“‘He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower.’” That, she thought was true, if a flower had ever been blasted in the face by a musketeer.

She stood on the flagstones of Lazen church’s aisle. Fittingly it was a gray day, threatening rain, and the light which came through the windows which had been stripped of their fine, stained glass was gloomy. The escutcheons of Lazen and Lazender had been hacked with pikes, while the stone effigies of Sir George’s ancestors, beneath whose gaze he was laid to rest, had been hammered with musket fire and then daubed with lime wash. They looked leprous.

Lady Margaret looked through her veil into the hole that had been made by lifting four flagstones. The vault of the church was damp. She could see the rotted end of an old coffin that abutted on to Sir George’s new coffin, just lowered into place. One day, she thought, she would lie in that hole, her eyes staring endlessly toward the worshippers above. Then, with the sudden realization that the world was turned upside down, she knew she might never lie beside Sir George. Even as the Reverend Simon Perilly read the obsequies, so was the County Committee for Sequestration meeting in Lazen’s great hall. Lazen was to be taken from her, from Sir Toby, the rightful heir.

It was wicked, it was unfair, yet she could do nothing. The Committee, gleeful in their victory, had picked the hour of the funeral so that the family could not be represented. John, Earl of Fleet, newly back from the Earl of Essex’s army that marched through the west, had nevertheless attended the committee. Lady Margaret doubted if he would achieve anything. On her right stood Anne, the Countess of Fleet, and on her left was Caroline. Toby was in his bedroom, and whether he would not be next beneath the earth was still in doubt.

Perilly’s voice rose. “‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.’”

Lady Margaret stood for two seconds, staring at the clean, planed wood of her husband’s coffin, then turned about. “Come.”

She stood outside, close to the charred patch of grass where the victorious Puritans had burned the altar rails, and there she thanked the villagers, tenants and servants who had crowded the church. She could give them thanks, but she could offer no hope for the future. She looked at Mr. Perilly. “Thank you, Simon. You did it well.”

The Reverend Perilly, whose theology was not to the taste of the victors, faced a future as uncertain as Lady Margaret’s. He folded his scapular on his prayer book. “He will be resurrected, Lady Margaret.”

She nodded. “I trust God will give time for revenge on the day of resurrection, Mr. Perilly.” She turned away, leading her daughters across the ravaged gardens toward the New House.

Upstairs, in Toby’s bedroom, Lady Margaret found the doctor bleeding her son. “Again?”