“You look like toadstools,” said Henry, giggling at our huge hats. Carr grabbed him and dunked him to the waist, my boy crying he laughed so hard.

“Ladies are not foul fungi,” Carr said, and I smiled to think how Frankie once dressed in the colors of one and how long ago that seemed.

“What’s this?” said Katherine, pulling the scroll from its hiding place. Frankie grabbed it and began to recite in her most pompous voice, imitating Sir Thomas Overbury. “‘The Wife,’” she began. The first verses were to be expected; the usual things about woman being the daughter of Eve, made of man to obey him. She lifted her eyebrows at: “One, thus made two, marriage doth re-unite, And makes them both but one hermaphrodite.” By the eighteenth verse she was flagging, irritated by the poet’s insistence that love can only in one person be found and, once married, no weak and worthless lust should rupture that bond. Carr clapped her performance, which pleased Frankie at first, but after a while it annoyed her that he did not see what we both did.

“‘Rather in her alive one virtue see,

Than all the rest dead in her pedigree.

Gentry is but a relic of time past:

And love doth only but the present see…’”

Frankie looked at Carr. She could say little in front of my children but it was clear that the poem was a pointed and public criticism of her. She read on, reciting aloud the most offending phrases.

“‘Domestic charge doth best that sex befit,

Continuous business; so to fix the mind,

That leisure space for fancies not admit:

Their leisure ’tis what corrupteth womankind.’”

Carr pretended to point out fish to my children, but his attention was fixed upon Frankie’s anger.

She handed me the scroll and I read the forty-seven stanzas, most of them dealing with women’s moral weakness. Overbury insisted upon the worthlessness of beauty, especially if its owner bestowed it on more than one man, and its lack of value when compared to goodness and obedience.

“Your friend advises you very publicly,” I said finally, my outrage too great to smother.

“I do not dictate his scribbles,” said Carr, not arguing with the fact that the poem was a denunciation of Frankie.

“He attacks my honor,” she said. It was both statement and warning.

“He knows nothing of love. Let us not waste this beautiful day fuming at his poetry.”

Frankie took the scroll and, staring at Carr, tore it into little pieces and threw them into the river. They floated, like ash or petals, but fish soon came and swallowed them.

“I heard that you challenged Sir Thomas Overbury to a duel,” I shouted to Sir David as we struggled through a mob pressed together like eels in a barrel. It was the end of June. We pushed forward until we reached the stage on which stood the gallows.