A shadow moved nearby. Footsteps stopped a few paces away. She heard the faint click of spurs. She didn’t care any more. Now that she’d abandoned herself to the angry helplessness of her emotions, she couldn’t have stopped the storm inside herself even if she’d wanted to. The footsteps moved away. But not far enough to forget them. She didn’t want to be aware of a new candle flame sputtering into life in the unfocused blaze around the Virgin. Yet it was enough to still her heaving chest for a moment and she fell silent, aware of the tears still coming through her fingers and the smeary mess her face must be, trying to breathe deep to control her sobs and what might be hiccups, pulling at her skin to try to dry it off, waiting for the unwanted fellow-worshipper with the spurs that clinked to go away.
But he didn’t. He came back and stood right next to her. Peeping out from between her fingers, she could see the spurs and the mud on his boots. She kept her head determinedly down. He’d go, she thought, in an agony of impatience; she just had to keep quiet.
There was a silence the length of a long-held breath. Then, with dread, she felt a hand on the tight curved agony of her back: a warm hand; a deep, comforting, heel-of-the-hand caress. She burrowed lower into herself to escape; but not before she’d felt the solid reassurance of it. When the surprisingly beautiful bass voice murmured, from just above her head: ‘Forgive me, but are you all right?’ the memory of that silken male touch, the like of which she might never feel in the future closing in around her, was enough to dispel her irritation at being interrupted in her private grief.
Miserably, resignedly, she raised her head. The face she could half-see looking down at her was thin and dark and hard. But it was softened by an expression of concern. He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than she was: eighteen or nineteen, maybe, like Thomas Claver. But he was an adult, with a shadowed jaw and the wiry strength of a man in the neat movement of his arms as he leaned further towards her, with enough delicacy of understanding to realise he shouldn’t touch her, clasping his hands together as if to stop himself. She was strangely warmed by the kindness in those narrow eyes.
‘Just praying,’ she said, with what shreds of dignity she could muster, looking straight back at him, daring him to give her the lie – how was he to know she wasn’t a hungry mystic, in the grip of a tearful vision? – but suddenly aware too of how she must look, with her kerchief pushed back and straggles of hair catching in her streaked wet face and her eyes all puffy and pink and swollen and her skin probably hideously blotched.
He didn’t respond except to go on looking unblinkingly at her, and there was something quizzical on a face she could see was used to weighing up new situations quickly. She raised a hand and wiped firmly at both cheeks, trying to master herself and surprised at finding that gaze was enough to quell her sobs. She even managed a watery smile as she uncurled herself and sat up on her knees, feeling the darkness inside shrink as her back muscles straightened. ‘Well, I was praying,’ she added defensively. ‘I was just crying too, that’s all.’
He smiled, now, and although he had thin lips it was an attractive, straightforward smile; she found her own lips curling briefly up in response, aware of her hands busying themselves in their own ritual of patting and tidying her face and head, trying to restore order to herself.
He didn’t comment on her appearance. She supposed there was nothing he could say without being either gallant, which would have been wrong, or discourteous, which would have been worse. He just carried on looking into her eyes, with the memory of a smile in his and with his body taut and still. She liked the stillness of him. She was aware of the sword buckled to his belt, the plain travelling cloak. He must have something to do with the troop movements, she thought, be a gentleman in someone’s entourage. But his presence was so encouraging that she found herself hoping he wouldn’t hurry away soon.
He didn’t. Eventually he murmured, ‘I’m forgetting that I came here to pray too.’ And he glimmered at her, with the beginning of another smile. ‘Like you. Sometimes your troubles seem so great that nothing but God’s guidance will be enough. And even that…’ He broke off and looked away, and she felt the sadness in him, a helplessness that seemed as great as hers, without needing to understand it. ‘May I pray with you?’ he said, a whisper of velvet bass.
She gestured, caught up in the moment, happy to have him near. He knelt beside her, in one fluid movement, and bent his head over his hands, and closed his eyes.
Isabel shut her eyes too and steepled her own hands, but she had stopped doing more than imitate the appearance of prayer; what she really wanted now was to hear the muttered words coming from the stranger’s lips. She wanted to know what he was praying for. ‘Even so, Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, deign to free me from every tribulation, sorrow and trouble in which I am placed and from the plots of my enemies,’ he was murmuring, a prayer as sombre as hers but not one to enlighten her; ‘and deign to send Michael the Archangel to my aid against them, and deign, Lord Jesus Christ, to bring to nothing the evil plans that they are making or wish to make against me, even as you brought to nothing the counsel of Achitophel who incited Absalom against King David…’
And his voice dropped to a drone of Latin, and then fell altogether silent. When she stole a sideways look at him, his lips were still moving; she thought she saw a tear glistening on his cheek too. He didn’t seem to be aware of it. He was lost to the world.
She went on watching. He was visibly reaching a resolution. His jaw tightened. Then, without warning, he dropped his hands, raised his head and looked round at Isabel, so quickly that she didn’t have time to lower her own curious eyes. Without reproach, his bright gaze held hers; she felt it as a shock right through her body.
‘So shall we both trust God to provide for us?’ he said, and grinned, a bit wolfishly, suddenly looking cheerful and eager to be on the move. He was on his feet, holding a hand out to her. Without thinking, she took it and scrambled up too. His hand was warm and dry with strong fingers. She found herself walking with him. To her surprise, they headed towards the bright arch to the street, feet in step.
As long as I’m out I don’t have to go home, Isabel thought, as the wind flapped at her skirts, with the fuzzy, fleeting contentment born of being caught up in an unexpected adventure. As long as no one sees me here I don’t have to decide what to do. So she followed the stranger obediently into the Bush tavern, a few steps away down Aldersgate, where he headed straight for a table in a vaulted alcove under a window where someone else’s meal, and the game of chess abandoned on a stool, hadn’t yet been cleared away, ordering a jug of claret and whatever cold meat the landlord had as he passed. He stood looking down at the checkered wood, absent-mindedly fingering the pieces left at the side of the board, while a serving girl piled up tankards on one of the greasy boards covered in pork rinds. Isabel edged round the tables and stools towards him, suddenly breathless at her own strange boldness in sitting down to eat with a stranger. But if he was aware of her discomfort he didn’t betray it. He was grinning at some thought of his own; he held one of the carved pieces out to her as she approached, and said lightly: ‘After all, perhaps none of the moves that worry us so much in life are as important as we think’. He popped the piece into its bag. ‘We all end up equal at the bottom of a bag, don’t we?’
Isabel’s nervousness vanished with the chess pieces he was whisking into their leathery resting place. She laughed and sat down. ‘I just don’t want to wait till I die before my problems get solved,’ she answered, wishing she could achieve the same resigned tone. ‘I’m hoping something will sort them out now.’
She wasn’t made to be philosophical. Nor could she quite find it in herself to do what she wanted to – find out more about her vis-à-vis. As soon as the maid had dumped two wooden platters in front of them, and even before he had finished pouring out the wine, Isabel found herself pouring out the whole story of her own troubles instead.
She told him how her