We lay together, two birds exhausted from long migration. To my thinking, Essex’s savagery set Frankie free from any obligation to him. The anger I felt revived my spirits. Although in my middle years and widowed, I was not ready to vanish either. Where once I was proud to call myself wife of a good man, I was not content to be shackled to a dead one. I warmed Frankie with my own body and rubbed her back when her tremors became violent, conjuring the ways before us. More than anything, it was important not to feel trapped. As when dreaming up a new design for apparel, I strayed around my mind, following paths until I found one that led somewhere. The sun set, and twilight lent its grace to the air.

“Perhaps there is another way,” I said. For the first time since George’s passing, I felt a spark of excitement. I sat up and hauled her upright beside me. “I know someone who might help us.”

“An assassin?”

“No! But we must go to him in disguise.”

“Is it unlawful?”

“It is a little desperate, and no one must ever know we are that.”

7

We do not know the significance of some events until they are long gone; others are heavy with import from the moment they begin. Our visit to Simon Forman was the latter. It started with a nightmare.

It was early autumn before he could see us. He requested we arrive after eight o’clock in the evening, it being too light for his work before then, and so I slept a little in the late afternoon. The weather was unseasonably warm and the window stood open in my chamber. The stench of mud and effluent rolled off the Thames at low tide. It forced its way into my dreams. I saw in them the weekly Mortality Bill with George’s name on it, but also Mary’s, dead from a cough, and then all my other children’s with the cause listed against each name: worms, griping in the guts, plague. My own was missing but, bereft of my children, I longed for death. Someone was throttling me. I was choking … it was a tremendous relief to open my eyes and see only my elderly maid’s wrinkled face. I was soaked in sweat.