We became like two sparrows, Frankie and I. Lord Essex refused to return her dowry until the Annulment Commission had made its decision, and her family were prodigiously in debt from building the largest private house in the country, bigger than any royal palace. “Spend and God will send,” was the motto of most courtiers, although Frankie’s parents got most of their money from bribes and from siphoning off monies meant for the navy and soldiers’ wages in Ireland. It was barely a secret; Frankie had told me this with no embarrassment because it was normal at Court and the King himself survived in like manner. Everyone was tremendously in debt; there, liberality was next to godliness.

As her parents had no longer any need to buy her obedience, Frankie had little money and I none. I became her fripperer, taking objects to pawn merchants, the money from which she spent on theater tickets and a few spangles to avert suspicion that she was short, while I spent my portion on food, medicine and coal. She was generous, as always, and lived in expectation of great riches if the Commission granted her release from Essex. Although her own family, especially her parents, were famously profligate, Carr was their equal. Marriage to him would cure our financial ills; tables so heavily laden drop more than crumbs for those who wait patiently.

In her apartment, emptied of her husband’s possessions and his sulking, there was a feeling of abeyance. The news that an annulment was to be considered provoked so great a storm of rebuke, from pulpit to market stall, that Frankie went out rarely and always heavily cloaked. This imprisonment, aggravated by her impatience to be married and to start a family, made her short-tempered and anxious. Girls eight or even ten years her junior were paraded daily before Carr as prospective wives.

It was a strange time. I was not under the governance and protection of a father, husband or lover. Arthur’s desertion of me caused gentlewomen to cease requesting my help. Frankie’s parents offered me small payments in return for acting as their daughter’s chaperone; I could not refuse the money, and so I slept many nights that winter on a narrow truckle in her chamber. I hated to be away from my children, but old Maggie looked after them in order that I could earn at least something.

One of those nights started like many others. Frankie and Carr were talking past one in the morning, and I could not sleep.