“How smart you are,” I said, finally taking him in, noting that his hair and beard had been barber-trimmed and his leather jerkin replaced with a cloth coat. “Are you hoping to impress the Countess?” He winced as if I had pinched him.

“You should not be throwing your lot in with the Countess,” he said, too free with his opinions; he had never dared advise me when my husband was alive. “Dr. Turner did not want her to meet Dr. Forman.”

“Things are different now.”

“They will be if you take her there.”

“Why?”

“Your husband saw danger in it.”

“Nonsense. For whom?”

“For you.” He looked at me in a way that made me see that it was not for the Countess he had dressed up. Embarrassment distracted me from his warning.

The evening was still bright and Weston’s lantern unlit. The steps to the street were broken and I swore under my breath as I carefully picked my way down. Our shilling-a-week house stood, or rather leaned, halfway along the south side of Paternoster Row, the middle of seven identical buildings without workshops. Its single redeeming feature was the view from the back into St. Paul’s churchyard. Paternoster Row runs along the north side of Paul’s and its mercers, silkmen and lacemakers attract the better sort whose coaches entirely block the way every day but Sunday. These same stroll about the church to gather the latest news until a little after eleven of the clock when they repair to the Castle for their twelvepenny dinners, or to the threepenny ordinaries if they are saving, to listen to the poets and philosophers and to show off their latest purchases. When their bellies are stuffed with capon and wine they away to a play; but at night, when the shops close, the place is unruly. Not a day went by when I did not resent my eldest son for forcing us out of Fetter Lane or pray that Arthur would soon take us away.

My neighbor, a widow barely keeping herself from the gutter, was making the most of the fine evening, sitting on the top step in her open doorway sewing a needle-lace trim for a handkerchief. Three of her children played around her like strays. None had shoes. Nearby a huge man, helped by his young apprentice, knocked a thick post into the ground to protect the houses from being pushed over by the crowds that clogged the street.

I had first encountered my neighbor a few weeks before, on the day I had moved in. The nosy termagant had not bidden me welcome but instead barked, “The beadles are strict round here. Don’t be entertaining gentlemen—and observe the curfew.” That first exchange with Mistress Bowdlery, for so she is called, dragged me from the gentility of Fetter Lane into the Stygian world of Paternoster Row, as fast as the current in the Thames pulls a man below.