The Silent Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

embrace, she yet held up her palms to keep him away. Intuition overcame need. Anne Hendrik knew at that precise moment in time that a trusting relationship that hadflowered over some years had changed irrevocably. He was no longer the man she thought she knew. Nicholas Bracewell inhabited another world and part of it lay sprawled out on the floor of the bedchamber like some dreadful accusation. He saw her consternation but could find no words of apology or explanation. Instead, he bent down again to make a closer examination of the corpse.
    A rush of sympathy brought tears to Anne’s eyes.
    ‘Poor wretch! What a hideous way to die!’
    ‘Someone will pay dearly for this,’ he murmured.
    ‘He came all that way to see you.’
    ‘No, Anne.’
    ‘And this is his reward.’
    ‘Look more closely.’
    ‘Can anyone deserve such a miserable death?’
    ‘There is something you have missed.’
    ‘He was but a youth on the threshold of life.’
    ‘I fear not,’ he said, rising to his feet once more and speaking with quiet outrage. ‘This is no youth, Anne. The killer is more callous than we imagined. He has poisoned a young woman.’
     
    Edmund Hoode was racked with doubt and tortured with regret. The surge of power that had enabled him to defy his colleagues and walk out of the house in Shoreditch had now spent itself. He was left feeling weak and helpless. As he ambled through the streets of Bishopsgate Ward, his heart was pounding and his feet encased in boots of lead. The impossible had happened. In a rare burst of single-minded action, a modest and highly unselfish man had behaved with brutal selfishness. Edmund Hoode put his own needsand desires before those of the company he had served so faithfully for so long. A series of interlinked betrayals – of Lawrence Firethorn, Barnaby Gill and the other sharers – was exacerbated by the wilful negation of his own creative role. In spurning Westfield’s Men, he was helping to suffocate his own career as a playwright.
    Dejection turned an already bloodless face into a white mask of sorrow. Hoode was a traitor. He felt like a convicted felon in Newgate prison, who, given the choice between the summary horror of hanging and the languid misery of being pressed to death, opted for the latter because it permitted his heirs still to inherit his estate. Great weights were indeed loaded onto him, but they were not all made of steel and stone. One of them was Nicholas Bracewell, his closest friend in the company, stunned by Hoode’s treachery and pressing down hard in the way he had done on the burning roof of the Queen’s Head. Firethorn was there, too, along with Gill, the one stamping unceremoniously on him and the other dancing one of the famous jigs that adorned so many of Hoode’s plays. Both left deep footprints on his wayward heart. As for his own last will and testament, what did he have to bequeath except his work for Westfield’s Men? As an author and an actor, he existed only in performance. Piracy was rife in the theatre. Those same plays of his – staged with unvarying distinction by the company – were guarded by the book holder with his life. Could Edmund Hoode really put his private urges before the public good? Could he hold Westfield’s Men to ransom?
    The weight of guilt and indecision was so excruciating that it brought him to a halt. If he went on, he lost the respect of his dearest friends: if he turned back, he missedhis one real opportunity for true happiness. He had walked aimlessly for a long time but his feet had known their duty for they had brought him to the very place where the first glimpse of Elysium had been vouchsafed to him. He was in her street, standing opposite her house and looking up at her chamber window. An invisible hand must have guided him there to resuscitate his drooping spirits. No sooner did he realise where he was than the sweet face of his beloved rose up before him. A hundred friends would not separate him from her. A