“Fetter Lane,” I said to Frankie’s driver when only our vehicle remained. I climbed up, for all the world like Elijah into his chariot, and sat forward on the upholstered bench so as to be seen. We traveled familiar streets made strange and important by the golden frame through which I viewed them. By the time we left Westminster and joined the Strand I was accustomed to the stares (how quickly we adjust to admiration) and settled back in comfort. I thought of Frankie and the Earl of Essex, children of opposite sides of the divided Court, married to heal wounds … or rather, to bring Essex to heel. The plan to muzzle him and his supporters through marriage to Frankie was optimistic, some might say unpardonable. I grasped at that moment, with equal dread and pride, what her mother had understood at the sight of Frankie’s wounded back; the marriage, vital to Howard interests, would rupture unless a remedy could be found, and the person best placed to provide it was me.

3

I waited to hear from Frankie as if from a new lover. Toward the end of January, I gave her up as a beautiful dream.

It was a mild but wet winter and I was content to keep indoors with my family, away from skidding carts and starving dogs. Poor harvests and high taxes were creating discontent in the markets and drinking shops. Not a day passed when I did not thank the Lord, my keeping angel and husband George for our smart new house on Fetter Lane. Its brick walls, glazed windows, large garden and views across the fields of Holborn, provided a spacious sanctuary for us and our six children. Nonetheless filth and pestilence were ever at the door in this City of Babel. I requested our cook to make a daily batch of bread to hand out to the beggars outside St. Andrew’s and under the gibbet at the junction with Fleet Street, but it assuaged my conscience more than their hunger.

“Paddy goes everywhere with an armed guard now, Kennedy has twice tried to kill him,” George said, chuckling as he watched me attire a cloth poppet, a French Baby, with a new design for Lady Kennedy’s approval. She had requested something daring in which to attend the Queen’s Masque, having grown too thin for her heavy Scotch gowns. As I stitched, I pictured her running bare-legged through the streets at night in nothing but her nightgown, chased by her husband, who had discovered her in bed with Sir William, George’s friend and President of the College of Physicians.