“She has a particularly amiable disposition,” Cato returned. “That was why I bought her.”
“Well, it must have had
Giles Crampton coughed. Cato glanced over his shoulder and met the open grins of the men behind him.
“Anyway,” Phoebe continued, “since I’ve come this far, I thought perhaps I would come the rest of the way. There’s something most particular I have to discuss with you, sir.”
Cato understood that he had been finessed. He could send her back with one of his men, but he realized that he had not the slightest desire to do so. Head on one side, she was regarding him with an appealing air that he could only describe as coquettish. It was a new side of Phoebe, and it entranced him. It was impossible to believe that he’d ever considered her a dull nonentity.
“We’ve ridden ten miles this morning. I intend to reach Aylesbury by noon -that’s another thirteen miles-and ride another ten miles after dinner. We will cover the same distance tomorrow and the next day.” His voice was uncompromising, revealing none of his thoughts.
Phoebe blanched. Ten miles had already left their mark. But she had made up her mind and she would not be defeated. “Do you think I can’t keep up, sir?”
“That was rather the point of my remarks,” he agreed with a cool nod.
“Well, I can,” Phoebe declared.
Cato examined her for an unnerving few minutes. She met his scrutiny steadily, and finally with a slight twitch of his lips he said, “Your friend described you as an avalanche. A remarkably accurate description.
“Gentlemen, let us continue.” Cato leaned back, took Sorrel’s bit at the bridle and drew her up beside his mount, observing almost casually, “It’s astonishing to me that in all your nineteen years, you’ve never learned to take no for an answer.”
“I really do have something very important to tell you,” Phoebe said.
“Well, it can wait until this evening.” He trotted his horse to the front of the troop, bringing Sorrel with him. “There’s no time for idle chatter now.”
Phoebe bit back a retort. He still thought he was humoring her by allowing her to come with him. It didn’t occur to him that she might have something really important and interesting to disclose. He was being an indulgent husband who, judging by the speculative gleam in his eye of a minute before, expected his indulgence to afford him some pleasure in return.
The day’s ride was a nightmare. For someone who’d never spent more than an hour on horseback, the next six hours were unrelenting torture. But Phoebe said not a word, clinging numbly to Sorrel’s reins, jouncing in the saddle when they broke out of a walk, closing her mind to the bruising soreness of her thighs and backside, and the dreadful deep ache in the small of her back.
Cato offered her neither sympathy nor an I-told-you-so exasperation. He helped her back into the saddle after the dinner break without comment, even though she was hard pressed to keep from crying out as her abused muscles were forced once again into screamingly unnatural positions.
But Cato knew exactly what she was going through. However, it was for Phoebe to say when she’d had enough; when she did, he’d arrange for her to return home with two of the troopers as escort. The journey took them through many small towns where it would be possible to acquire a gig or trap, and she could go back to Woodstock in easy stages.
He waited all afternoon for her to throw in the sponge, but she never did, merely sat in white-faced, tight-lipped endurance. He couldn’t help admiring her stubborn fortitude even though he deplored it. It was ridiculous for her to suffer like this. But when they stopped for the night, she would see reason, he was certain of it.
Phoebe fell into his arms when, just before dusk, he helped her to dismount in the stable yard of a small inn in the village of Aston Clinton. But she refused his arm and walked stiffly into the inn although every muscle shrieked in rebellion.
“I’ve a private chamber over the washroom, m’lord, if that’ll do ye,” the landlord offered. “Otherwise, it’s jest the loft above the stables. We don’t get much call for gentryfolk wantin‘ beds fer the night.”
In any other circumstances the loft would have suited Cato as well as it suited his men, but Phoebe’s presence altered matters.
“I don’t mind where it is!” Phoebe declared, speaking for the first time in hours, in a tone ringing with desperate frustration. “Just show me to it.”
The landlord bowed and hastened down the passage, through the kitchen, and up a narrow wooden staircase at the rear. The small chamber was thick with the smell of lye soap from the great cauldrons boiling below, but it had a good-sized bed with a mattress stuffed with horsehair. Phoebe dismissed her escort with an inarticulate wave before falling facedown on the bed, smothering her groans in the patchwork quilt.
She had no idea how much time had passed before she heard the door open and Cato’s unmistakable steady tread on the creaking floorboards.
“I’m not asleep,” she mumbled. “I’m ready to come down for supper.”
“We’ll see about that in a minute,” he said easily. Something clinked as he set it on the floor.
Phoebe turned her head, forcing herself to open leaden eyes as she attempted to struggle upright. A hand between her shoulder blades pushed her down again.
“Lie still, Phoebe. I’m no leech and can’t emulate your friend’s physician skills, but I’ve a trick or two for easing certain ills.” His voice was light, a little amused, perhaps, but Phoebe found it as soothing as a dock leaf on a nettle sting.
He pulled off her boots as she lay across the bed, then tossed up the skirts of her riding dress and expertly reached beneath her for the buttons of her britches at her waist. He peeled them down and tossed them to the floor.
Phoebe gave a soft sigh of relief as the cool air laved her sore and burning flesh.
“Dear God!” Cato exclaimed softly as he surveyed the damage. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“There wasn’t any need to say anything,” Phoebe insisted. “I was perfectly all right.”
He shook his head in disbelief as he dipped a towel in the steaming water in the pail he’d brought up with him. He wrung it out and laid it across the small of her back.
“Oh,” Phoebe mumbled in almost disbelieving relief as the heat from the towel began to unlock the tight ache.
Cato uncorked a small leather vial of witch hazel and gently smoothed it across her buttocks and down her thighs, before applying more hot towels.
“Oh, that feels wonderful.” Phoebe stretched her arms over her head, relaxing as the heat seeped into the soreness.
“Tomorrow you can rest here and then the next day Adam and Garth will escort you home. I’ll purchase a gig so-”
“No!” Phoebe turned over, scattering hot towels as she sat up. “No, I will not go home, Cato. You said I could accompany you to Harwich and I
Cato wrung out another hot towel. “Don’t be ridiculous, Phoebe. Lie down again. You’re one big bruise from the small of your back to your knees. You can’t possibly ride another yard.”
“I can and I will,” she stated flatly. “It’s not for you to say what I can manage and what I can’t.”
“Oh, isn’t it?” Cato raised an eyebrow. “Since this is a military mission, it most certainly is for me to say. Let’s have no more foolishness, Phoebe. You had your way for a day, but that’s enough now.”
Phoebe climbed gingerly off the bed, shaking down her skirts. “Brian Morse says he has a document from the king that gives conclusive evidence that the king has no intention of agreeing to the Scots’ demands,” she stated. “That’s what I came to tell you.”
Cato stood with the towel still in his hands. “You’ve talked with Brian about this?”
“Yes. And also about why Cromwell and some others doubt your commitment… and…” she went on in a rush, seeing him about to interrupt. “And why you won’t defend yourself against those charges. Perhaps they’re sending you on this mission to get rid of you. Perhaps they don’t want you ever to come back.”
“How dare you discuss me and my concerns with Brian… or indeed with anyone!”
“I didn’t discuss them with Brian, he discussed them with me.” Phoebe met his gaze steadily.
Cato regarded her in frowning silence, then the anger in his eyes faded, to be replaced by something hard and bright that Phoebe thought was even more menacing than anger. He dropped the towel into the bucket and went to the door. He bellowed down the stairs, “Landlord, bring me up a pint of canary sack and two cups.”
He turned back to Phoebe. “All right. Now you may tell me exactly what went on between you and Brian. Every word, every gesture. You will leave nothing out.”
His voice and that stony light in his eyes chilled her. Carefully Phoebe sat down on the bed. “Where shall I begin?”
“At the beginning.”
Phoebe was searching for the right point when the landlord labored up the stairs with a jug of sack and two pewter cups.
“Ye’ll be wantin‘ supper, sir?” Puffing, he set the jug and cups down on a rickety stool in the corner of the chamber. “The wife’s done a nice jugged hare, an’ there’s a good morsel o‘ tripe.”
He wiped his brow with a soiled neckerchief. “Quite warm ‘tis fer April.”
“Aye,” Cato agreed shortly. “We’ll sup anon.”
“Right y’are, sir.” The man bent his corpulent frame in the semblance of a bow and backed out.
Cato went to latch the door, then he poured sack into two cups, handed one to Phoebe, and ordered curtly, “Begin.”
Phoebe left nothing out, except for how close she had nearly come to agreeing to help with Brian’s plan. Just thinking about it brought a cold sweat to her brow. She certainly didn’t want Cato to know of it.
Cato listened for the most part in silence, occasionally interjecting a question. But Phoebe was relieved to see his demeanor change, and she sensed he was no longer angry with her.
When she’d fallen silent, he nodded thoughtfully. “So, it’s as I suspected all along.”
“What is?”
Instead of answering, Cato asked with a slightly quizzical smile, “Why did you wait until now to tell me this? You could have told me anytime in the last two days, before I left, could you not?”
“It didn’t suit me to do so,” Phoebe said frankly.
Cato shook his head but there was a laugh in his voice. “What a devious ragged robin I’ve taken to wife.”
“Well, when you won’t include me or confide in me, then I have to take matters into my own hands,” Phoebe responded, and now there was a distinctly martial light in her eye.
Cato frowned at this. “I give you much more rein than most wives have, Phoebe. You must know that.”
“I don’t want rein,” Phoebe flashed. “I’m not a horse. I want to be a wife in every respect. Not just in bed, or arranging your household, or-”
“I hadn’t noticed you did too much of that,” Cato interrupted dryly.
He had her there. Phoebe conceded ruefully, “Mistress Bisset is better at it than I am. And besides, I have other important things to do.”
“Yes, like being taken up for a witch and meddling in my affairs with my snake of a stepson!”
“Oh, that’s so unjust!” she fired.
He caught her chin on his palm, lifting her face so she had to meet his eye. “I do my best to accommodate your eccentricities, Phoebe. But there are areas of my life that I have no wish to share… with you or with anyone. You have to understand that.”
“I don’t wish to intrude,” Phoebe said in a low voice. “But I love you.” She hadn’t meant to say it but it was done now.
Cato regarded her, an arrested look in his eye. A
Something hovered on the periphery of his mind. Something amorphous and warm and unnameable. “You’re very precious to me, my sweet,” he said, and kissed her. “Now, why don’t I have them heat the water in the washhouse and you can have a long soak in a tub. Then you get into bed and I’ll have a maid bring up your supper.”
