“Court ladies have no loyalty to you. They let you attire them so that they can hear gossip about the Countess. She is a dangerous friend,” he said, turning away and walking into the dark passage.

As he opened the front door, sunlight lanced the vestibule, alive with dust motes. He looked at me. “Renounce sham gentility and take up a reputable calling. You live above your station.”

“The Countess holds us up by the chin,” I retorted. “And you are happy to run her errands and fill your pockets with Robert Carr’s money! You tell me to consort only with ladies of the middling sort and leave the fine ones alone while, thanks to my intercession, you spend your days trotting from one earl to the next?”

The sun lit Weston’s hair into a wiry halo, an unlikely saint. “What is right for me is not right for you,” he said. “You and the Countess would do better to save your strength for those realms in which you can hold sway.”

“Hold sway?” I said, coughing out the words in my indignation. “And what realm is that? The realm of hungry, cold children? Can Frankie ‘hold sway’ while she is barren? You count yourself a practical man, but what you say is twaddle.”

I shooed him out of the door and glared after him with arms crossed as he walked away. At the junction with Cheapside he turned and squinted into the sunlight. When he saw that I was still scowling after him, he raised his cap and bowed.

For five days in mid-November, the City was halted by snow. It felt to be an omen, but of what I could not say; the beauty and light of it augured well, but we were trapped, insignificant in the face of God’s command of all things. When finally it melted, Mistress Bowdlery came out to make lace on her step. She now trimmed most of the Countess’s cuffs and ruffs and Robert Carr’s also, and had been as forthright in her thanks to me as she had been in her warnings about the beadles on the day we met. My growing fondness for her had prompted stories of her past; before widowhood, she had been a woman of substance.

“Is that for your daughter’s wedding?” I said.

“Betrothal’s off. Apparently we’re too unlucky a family to marry into. What they mean is too poor.”