It was a strange spring, one moment brilliant with sunshine and empty blue skies, the next battered by tempest, the streets running with water in which floated ordure and the stiff bodies of small animals. They were months pregnant with the possibility of great advance or total destitution. I could marry Arthur and be higher in rank and fortune than even my mother had been before her marriage. Or fall entirely, bullied by my eldest son, lost to all society. I pitied myself, but I pitied Frankie more. My marriage, though arranged, had been a match of mutual respect and contentment. Frankie’s had been motivated by politics alone. She admitted that she would be delighted if her husband dropped dead. “Not delighted,” she corrected herself, “but relief would soon triumph over grief.”

As summer arrived, four months after George’s death, the lawyers decided for Thomas. The house was two-thirds his and he could rule in it as he wished within the bounds of law. I could not suffer his injunctions, and Arthur would not marry me so soon after George’s death, so I moved out. I am a proud woman, it is a trait Frankie and I share, and I would not beg from Thomas or Arthur. Anyway, begging never gets people what they want.

I found lodgers for the three rooms in Fetter Lane and used the income to rent a cheap dwelling within the City walls that my younger brother Eustace helped me to find. The plague was bad that summer, as it had been the year before, so I chose as clean a street as I could afford in a well-run parish with a water conduit nearby.

I could no longer entertain friends, go to the theater or the Exchanges, replace worn-out clothes, have a maid to dress my hair, hire a chair or coach, go to Court or, indeed, go into any society that required smartness; I presumed that it would mean the end of my friendship with Frankie. The differences between us yawned too vast. The rich can never truly be friends with the poor. Arthur would marry me as soon as permitted by custom, but by then someone else would be holding her hand. I experienced a second wave of grief and postponed telling her for fear it would make it impossible for me to be brave for my children. She would find out soon enough, when she called at my door and only Thomas was in.