Old Maggie opened the bed curtains, prattling on about the river’s stink and that it was never like that in Fetter Lane. The move over the summer had been difficult for us all. The place in Paternoster Row was three hundred years old and near collapse, but cheap. Richard Weston had tried to persuade me to retire to the manor George had bought in Bedfordshire, but I might as well have climbed into the grave, for the place was damp and we would all have been dead before the end of winter. Nor would there be any profit from its sale, for it was mortgaged. There were not enough funds to send John to Oxford or provide a dowry for Barbara. I, four children, old Maggie and a kitchen maid, were living in a decrepit terrace that felt something akin to debtors’ prison.

On the day of the move, Richard Weston had hired a large cart and loaded it for me. We had walked behind to guard the contents from thieves, all of us in tears, the children clinging to their few possessions that I had held back from the pawn merchant. It felt like a funeral. Henry, only four, suffered the loss of his father very badly and this further grief and turmoil sent him into a silence that lasted for weeks. I missed George so much that it weighed on my chest like a great stone in unexpected moments, such that I wept when I found a bag, neatly packed for a trip he had expected to take, or when a half-sucked sweet fell out of his document chest. Even so, I was angry that he had kept from me the level of our debt. I rose every morning for the children’s sake, though the crumbling of their prospects doubled my grief. Arthur visited when he could, with hampers of food and good cheer, but he was required to follow Baron Ellesmere to his estates for some of the summer months, the city too fetid and plague-ridden for the wealthy to endure.

A letter had arrived from him as I slept and at the sight of it my sadness lifted a little. I put it in my pocket to read when I was alone and tidied the house before I went out, only able to bear the daily drama of widowhood on an ordered stage. My skin had erupted in red patches since George’s death, making my grief visible for all to see. As I neatened our few remaining possessions in the parlor, Katherine and Mary entered, ready for bed.

“You may choose a Baby each but be quick,” I told them.