Her daughter rose, flinching as if wasps stung her, and swiveled on unsteady feet. As she turned, her back was revealed through a rip in her undershirt from collar to coccyx. The skin was slit all over with bleeding welts. I could feel the burning pain in those lashes and the hair on my forearms pricked up in shock and pity for this girl. How furious her mother would be at the damage inflicted on her beautiful child.

Yet there was no cry of horror, not even a gasp. To protect one’s child is the first compulsion of any parent; to determine cause and fault follows later. Not, it seemed, with Frances’s mother. Her sisters also stood mute. “Why are you still not dressed, hmm?” said the Countess, her face glistening, hard as a sugar sculpture. She turned to me. Every time we met she affected barely to know me unless we were alone. “I have heard you are talented with apparel,” she said. I curtsied but said nothing, unsure what the statement insinuated. “You have come to help my daughter dress.”

It was not a question.

“I cannot dress,” mumbled Frances.

Her mother stepped forward, I thought to hold her, but instead she put ringed fingers under her daughter’s chin and forced the girl to look at her. Was she envious? The Earl of Suffolk was known to favor Frances above his other children—perhaps above his wife too? Did he whisper in the girl’s ear that she understood him best? I have seen daughters thus favored become unhappy wives when they cannot bewitch their spouses as they did their fathers.

“If you do not attend today, your husband will send you to his estate at Chartley, hmm?” she said, as if to a half-wit. “It is far away and comfortless. He will keep you there, whipping you without cease if he wishes, until you submit to your marriage as your sisters have done to theirs.”

I sensed the distance between myself and Frances Howard contract and wanted to take her in my arms. It is a hard fate to have a cruel husband. He was barely seventeen and already pitiless.

“You will feel better when you look better,” said the older sister, Elizabeth, not kindly.

“Do you?” asked Frances.

The sister flushed. “Your self-interest reflects badly upon us all. You have not even the hardest of it.” Frances only shrugged. Her mother put the white object she had been pinching into Frances’s hand and tugged her daughter’s shift into place as if it were a presentable thing not ripped and bloodied by her son-in-law.

“Please see that she is dressed by midday,” she said, neither looking at me nor making clear how she intended to make my intervention worthwhile. She left, trailed by her more tractable daughters.

Frances sent out her maids, then glared at me.

“My mother pays you to make me obedient?”