I opened the cupboard to the left of the fireplace on the shelves of which sat more than a hundred French Babies dressed in clothes of my design. I had nearly thrown them out when we moved but could not; they were the relics of my married life and I might have need of them to earn our living.

On the top shelf were the earliest examples, shabby things made when I was a child, kept only because my mother helped me to sew them. When I married, the maquettes became smarter as I had money from George to pay for better fabrics. Only one shelf was labeled with a date, 1603, seven years before but a different life; it was the year that I fell in love with Arthur, the old Queen died, and the new King’s arrival was delayed by so fierce a bout of plague that the city was filled with ghosts. Our neighbor, a lovely girl, collapsed outside our house on her way to be married and was dead by nightfall. Every family on the street suffered loss except us. The Devil was cheated then and has looked for any carelessness on my part. Since George’s death, he has been breathing down my neck. I placed two French Babies into the hands of my girls and kissed them many times.

I was sad but not miserable, for I am not someone with my head on backward; the house in Paternoster Row was not ideal, but it would be only a temporary home to us. Once I was married to Arthur, we would live in a house even finer than that in Fetter Lane and I would be admitted to Court through my own honor and not by clutching to Frankie’s hem. Arthur and I loved each other, and his was the world to which I had always sought to belong. There was a chance for greater happiness than I had ever known.

Richard Weston arrived as the bells tolled seven.

“What news, Weston?” I said, using the commonplace greeting of people not, in fact, much interested in the person before them.

“Please,” he replied immediately, as if he had rehearsed all day what he wanted to say and must unburden himself of it before he forgot his lines, “now that I am no longer your husband’s bailiff but your friend and protector by dint of Dr. Turner’s dying wishes, might you not call me Richard?”

I was too astonished to reply. Weston had been our servant for so many years that I balked at acknowledging him as a friend. Yet he was the only man upon whom I could call when I needed protection; Thomas refused, John was often studying elsewhere, my brothers either lived too far away or were busy with their own lives. In the end I nodded but did not look him in the eye, for fear he would see the dishonesty in my own.