The fire was dying behind its screen, the room becoming chill, but neither moved to put more wood on the feeble flames. Campion listened, her wine forgotten, listened to a stranger tell her who she was.

Lopez stroked his beard. “Before all that happened, before Kit wrote his poem about King James, he fell in love. Dear God! He was smitten. He wrote to me that he had found his ‘Angel,’ and he would marry her. By then I’d known him six years and I doubted he’d ever marry, but he wrote to me again, six months later, and he was still in love. He said she was innocent, gentle and very strong. He also said she was very, very beautiful.” Lopez smiled at her. “I think she must have been, for she was your mother.”

Campion smiled at the compliment. “What was her name?”

“Agatha Prescott. An ugly name.”

“Prescott?” Campion frowned.

“Yes. She was the younger sister of Martha Slythe.” Lopez shook his head in wonderment. “I don’t know how Kit Aretine met a Puritan girl, but he did, and he fell in love, and she with him, and they never had time to marry. He was arrested, taken to the Tower, and he left her pregnant.”

Mordecai Lopez sipped his wine. “She was alone. I suppose she asked Kit’s friends for help, but he ran with a swift pack in those days and the help never came. Who needed a pregnant angel?” He shrugged. “I didn’t know her, she didn’t know me. I wish I could have helped, but she did the fatal, perhaps the only thing. She crawled home in disgrace.”

Campion tried to imagine how Matthew Slythe would have behaved if she had come home pregnant. It was a fearful thought. She felt a pang for the girl who had been forced back to the Prescotts.

Lopez clasped his hands on his knees. “They hid her. They were ashamed, and sometimes I think they may have been glad at what happened. She died of the childbirth fever just days after you were born. Perhaps they hoped you’d die, too.”

Campion had to blink back tears, swept by a terrible pity for a girl who had tried to break the same bonds that she had tried to break. Her mother, like the daughter she left behind, had wanted to be free, yet in the end the Puritans had snatched her back to a lonely, vindictive death.

“So there you were,” Lopez smiled, “a little bastard, the shame of the Prescott family. They called you Dorcas. Doesn’t that mean ‘full of good works’?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what they wanted you to be, yet the works were to be their works. They would bring you up as a good Puritan.” Lopez shook his head. “When Kit was released from the Tower he wrote to the Prescotts, asking for news, and he offered to take you from them. They refused.”

She frowned. “Why?”

“Because they’d solved their problem by then. Agatha had an older sister. I’m told Martha was not as beautiful.”