How could I get her from that “vile place?” If force were required, her brothers would be better placed to take her from Chartley to a Howard residence. All I could do was to send her Forman’s tinctures. Before he died, he had made her a new one, brewed from galls caused by insects, fungus, parasites or injury, to temporarily weaken the force of the person who imbibed it, not unto death, only unto discouragement.

“She despairs because her youth is almost over,” he had said to me during our last consultation. He had recently acquired a huge striped cat that he led about on a leash. “Fourteen to twenty-four are the years of youth. Twenty-five to forty-four are the years of middle age. Forty-five to fifty-five, one is aged. Fifty-six to death, one is old. I am fifty-eight and too old for anything but honesty. The astrological figure I drew for the Countess of Essex shows my future to be as full of contention and misapprehension as has been my past.”

“Your future is in her chart?” I asked. Forman shut his eyes, as if the knowledge gave him a splitting headache.

“The connection destroys my reputation after my death.”

“In truth?” I said.

Forman patted my hand.

“Calm yourself. The stars can exaggerate.”

“Are you also in my chart?”

“Yours too.”

“Why? What else is in it? What of Arthur?” But he held up his hand.

“My dear, to be happy in uncertainty is a skill that stands us all in good stead,” he told me, unhelpfully.

Now I held Frankie’s letter to the candle flame and let it burn to the tips of my fingers before throwing the curling ashes in the grate. The memory of my exchange with Forman frightened me, but I wrote Frankie a reply full of good cheer and gossip from Court. The following morning, I carried it downstairs with a vial of the new liquid and some buskins she had requested from her cordwainer that she might walk outside at Chartley where all was mud.

Richard Weston was in the kitchen and took the parcel. I had seen little of him since he had become the go-between for Frankie and myself. Sometimes Lord Northampton made use of him too and, I suspected, Robert Carr. I missed his company.

“You look tired. Will you have some broth?” I asked.

“Gladly,” Weston replied. I handed him a bowlful. George’s cat jumped onto my lap and turned around and around before settling down and rhythmically kneading her paws into my thigh. I stroked her velvet head.

“You are wearing the doublet of a man,” he said bluntly.

“It was you who taught me how to make a doublet. Many women borrow the looks of men now that men are making full use of their womanish beauty.”