‘And was the bedding properly done?’ Gertrude asked in an undertone. ‘You will not hold him to the marriage if he can argue that the work was not undertaken or carried through.’

‘Of course. And he does not wish to withdraw from the marriage. He was summoned away to his lord. He sent me a message from London. I expect him back every day.’

‘The sheets were hardly marked at all,’ Gertrude pointed out.

Elizabeth flushed. She had resorted to strawberry jam on the bed linen. It was the tradition that the newlyweds’ sheets be put to air over their windowsill so that the neighbours and the community might be assured that a marriage had been made and consummated and was now indissoluble. Not even people of the class of Elizabeth and John could escape public scrutiny.

‘They were marked enough,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Oh, well!’ Gertrude sat back in the hard chair and looked around the little parlour. ‘He has left you comfortably, at least. As long as he provides for you I daresay you will not miss him, having been a spinster so long.’

‘He will provide for me, and he will return to me,’ Elizabeth replied calmly. ‘He had to go to Theobalds with some new plants for the earl. But I expect his return any day.’

‘You’d have done better to marry a farmer!’ Gertrude gave a malicious little laugh. ‘Better a little mud on your parlour floor than a husband who leaves you the very morning after you are wed.’

‘Better to be married to a man high in the favour of the Earl Cecil himself than to be a woman who knows nothing beyond the hills of her home!’ Elizabeth flared up.

‘Do you mean me, you saucy miss!’ Gertrude exclaimed, leaping to her feet. ‘For I shall not be insulted by you. Your stepfather shall hear of it! And he will make you sorry for your impertinence! I shall send him down here after he’s had his dinner and he will tell you what we think of impertinent spinsters, married a night and abandoned the next day! You’ll be lucky if your husband ever comes home at all! I shall see you at my back door wanting your own bed back, I don’t doubt it!’

Elizabeth strode to the door and flung it open. ‘I am not a miss, saucy or otherwise,’ she declared. ‘And my stepfather has no rights over me any more and neither do you. I do not have to listen to you, and I certainly don’t have to obey him. My father would not have used me so!’

‘Easy to say!’ Gertrude retorted. ‘Since he is not here to contradict you!’

‘He would not contradict me,’ Elizabeth rejoined. ‘He was like me. The faithful kind: we love and stay loyal. We don’t flit from one to another like a drunk bee.’