“My little sister Margaret fell ill this autumn and gave me her pearls to look after until she got better,” she said, rubbing her thumb over them. “I was nearly ten when she was born and was allowed to care for her like she was my own. God took her three weeks ago. She was nine.” I was pained by that news. It explained perhaps her mother’s hard face and the depth of Frances’s despair. My keeping angel had spared me that grief but, like all mothers, I lived in fear of any hurt to my children and I made the sign of the cross.

“You think that will protect you?” she asked.

“It costs nothing.” In truth, I had stopped attending mass four years previously. Catholic fanaticks had attempted to blow up the royal family and their ministers in the Powder Plot. I could not align myself with such people. Its discovery made the lives of all Catholics in these isles harder, with renewed fines and greater abuse. Even George stopped attending confession. I did not know if Frankie went and had not the familiarity to ask her, yet I knew she and her family were Catholic and that made me feel safer than I would have done in the great Protestant houses.

“All my love and prayers did not save Margaret. Her loss has turned earth to water beneath my feet. I feel her in my arms, her weight on my lap. Her death is as if I saw it on a stage and nothing convinces me that she will not skip into the room at any moment and demand kisses as she always did.”

I worked gently and in silence, hoping that she could feel my care. Words cannot dam sorrow, nor should they. They can make a soul feel less alone, but I did that with my work better than my talk.

“Everyone is angry with me,” she said, after a long moment of companionable quiet. “My mother thinks it my fault that my husband hates me and my eldest sister believes that I have made a much smaller sacrifice than her own.”

“You and your sisters have married well,” I said, cutting the ruined undershirt from her perfect body and dropping a clean one over her head.

“We have married high,” she corrected, “Elizabeth to a man older than our grandfather would have been had he not been executed. None of us has produced an heir.”

“Why did you deserve a whipping?”

“For a sigh when again he could not penetrate me. He says I must not talk unless it is in answer to a question. Nor laugh.”

“Perhaps he is ashamed,” I said, fitting a stiff bodice like armor, flattening and broadening her chest. She eyed it, the horse resentful of its tight girth, but said nothing. “Shame can make a person cruel. He has returned from Europe to find his bride a woman while he is still a boy.”