I went to the window and watched him untether his horse and walk down the Row toward Ludgate. I thought he would look back, was sure he would search for my face in the window, but he did not. I shook with rage and my heart thumped as if I were pursued by baiting dogs, but there was a strange lightness in my spirits too. As I watched Arthur turn the corner, I understood that it came from speaking honestly to him for the first time since George’s death. Now he knew, without a doubt, my expectations and my disappointment, and there was some satisfaction in that.

I know it is often the case that an adulterous entanglement changes in nature when a spouse dies. Marriage provides the comfort that comes from long living together. Once that is gone, the adulterous affair founders in its own shallows. But I loved Arthur and believed that he loved me and adored our children. With the right encouragement he would still marry me. Couples often have a tiff before the reluctant partner agrees to marry.

Still, the heaviness in my gut told me that I had just taken the biggest gamble of my life. If Arthur was not goaded to action, and Frankie remained exiled at Chartley, then I would soon be on the doorstep with Mistress Bowdlery, my sons at work as rakers and jakes farmers, keeping the streets and cesspits clean for the feet and noses of the better sort, to whom we would never again belong and who would not notice as we starved, fell ill and died.

I turned from the window and was about to leave the room when I remembered the chain and wondered whether Barbara would like it; it was a long time since she had been given anything pretty. I went to retrieve it but Arthur had taken the box with him.

11

Lord Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, the King’s closest adviser, lover of both Frankie’s mother and mother-in-law, died in May. Soon afterward, a message arrived from Frankie asking me to meet her at the sign of the Blue Lion on the upper floor of the New Exchange. Although we had written several times a week, it had been eight months since last we met, other than brief meetings at Christmas and New Year. Essex had declared that he would continue to drag her between the remote houses of his relations for the summer, so I was surprised that she was back.