“Oh, Lord! It is too hot to think. Let’s go on the river.” She sent her coach to collect my three youngest children as I salved and bandaged her foot. By three o’clock, Mr. Palmer was handing us down into her barge. He could not spend the afternoon with us but, as he kissed my hand, he pressed the scroll into it.

“This is much discussed. It might be best to read it,” he said quietly.

As we pushed off, we heard a shout. Robert Carr was running down the passage to the stairs. The craft was moving away from the bank. Frankie screamed at him not to risk falling in the water for he would be swept away. With a mighty yell, he leaped from the top stair and traveled through the air so fast that he nearly toppled out of the other side of the barge as he landed. Mary, Katherine and Henry shrieked and grabbed him. He fell into the bottom of the boat and pulled them down on top of him, rolling about like a hog and making them squeal. He picked up each child in turn and pretended to chuck them overboard, dangling them above the sparkling water so that the toes of their shoes were wetted as they kicked and screeched with delight.

“Shoes off!” he ordered. The children could not get them off fast enough, stockings too, and he sat them on the edge of the boat, holding them as they leaned forward to get their legs into the water. He looked over at Frankie and me. “Shoes off!” he commanded again. I hesitated, for fear they would notice the darns in my stockings, but Frankie was next to my children in a flash and I stuffed my poor footwear out of sight. The poem I stuck in my shoe.

Frankie held my children as Carr took off all the clothes he could with decency. The boat was the only place in which they felt free from the spies paid for by her family and probably by others too. Even so, Frankie, Carr and I all donned large sunhats to protect ourselves from the heat and from gossip—the river was always busy and the barge carried Frankie’s arms.

Through the hot months that summer we often took refuge on the river. When Carr could not accompany us, we stayed in the houses of her family on the shores of the Thames, all the way to Oxford. She disliked being in Westminster in the heat, but wanted to be near Carr when business brought him back to Whitehall from the King’s summer progress. We spent many days lying under the shade and privacy of the barge’s canopy, the flitting of blue-green dragonflies exaggerating the torpor of the world around us. Elsewhere there was drought, hunger and plague; but on Frankie’s gilded craft, on the glass-green stillness of the river, we were at peace.