As I had entered Palace Yard, just after dawn, it was clear that here was none of the carnival atmosphere typical of a public hanging. The usual crowd of flap-eared newsmongers, lawyers, drabs, thieves, beggars, and innocents up from the country to pursue a claim in the courts was swollen by tidings of witches in Pendle and Northamptonshire that had brought the fearful out with the sight-seers. I was dressed soberly and masked, but it was no protection. Within a few minutes of arriving, a hand grabbed my privities.

“Lift your skirts, Molly. I’ll have you for sixpence!”

All the fury I had quashed, at Arthur’s irresolution and the myriad indignities of widowhood, burst from me. I elbowed my attacker so hard that he let out a great belch.

“Widow Turner?”

I whipped round, appalled that someone had witnessed the skirmish. Sir David Wood, a Scottish courtier, was grinning at me.

“Ah’ll nae take my chances with ye in a fight!” he said, bowing as best he could in the mob.

“Sir David.” I dipped a knee.

“Let me be of service,” he said, putting a hand in the small of my back and pushing us toward the gibbet. The man about to die was a Scot, and Robert Carr had asked me to move among the crowd to hear what was said of the “beggarly bluebonnets,” as those who had ridden into England with King James were known. I would tell him the truth. In the short time since he had become Frankie’s lover, we had come to feel sympathy for each other. Despite his finery, he was a foreigner in London, despised by people afraid that he and his kind were taking what was theirs.

“Overbury refused tae come into the field,” Sir David answered. “That malicious dog bites the heads off others tae stand taller himself. There’s a man who could hang without a tear shed.” I was prevented from asking what offense Overbury had offered Sir David by a great roar from the crowd announcing the arrival of the condemned man. Baron Sanquhar, a Scottish noble, had murdered the man who put out his eye in a fencing lesson several years before. Taking a life for an eye was more than the Bible advised, but the life had been a common one while the eye belonged to a Baron of three hundred years’ pedigree. No one expected him to hang.