“This is an Eagle Stone put in nests by those great birds to enable them to propagate. Within the gem is a smaller stone,” he rattled it, “no one knows how it gets in there. These stones are exceedingly rare and protect a woman from miscarriage if tied to the right arm. I wear it to protect against bladder stones, such as killed poor George, God rest his soul, and from fevers and plague. I was given it by a wealthy woman I treated for her inability to have further children after her fourth baby. She had bought it from a Venetian. Four times it proved effective but thereafter she lost every child. Weakened by miscarriages and gravely ill, she pressed the ring on me but I did not want it, it had lost its power. Then she confessed that the dead babies were not by her husband, who would not sleep with her after discovering her shameful secret: lust for her own brother. The stone had caused the product of incest to fail; it knew what she had kept secret from everyone. For my interventions to work, only the truth between us will do,” he said. “Do you wish your husband dead?”

She sat down, unsettled. “How else can I be free?” In the silence that followed I could hear the tiny creaks of the window-lead cooling in the darkness.

“The sacred bond of matrimony can be broken only by the death of one party and I am bound by the Hippocratic Oath,” Forman stated clearly. “Angels are not. They must be called in this case.”

“Will angels keep a husband from his wife’s bed? Or speed his death? Is that God’s work?”

“Ah! I have broken my brains in studying the Providences of God. They are beyond our comprehension. We can but ask and they will do as He wills.”

“Can they keep the man I like faithful to me while they work?” she asked.

Forman’s eyebrows shot up and he laughed, giggled really. “You are used to being obeyed, I see!” It was some moments before he gained control of himself. Wiping the tears from his cheeks, he said, “I need his name.”

“My lady,” I warned. Forman placed his hand over his heart and I raised my eyes to heaven.

“Sir Robert Carr,” she said, ignoring me, again. She had only herself to blame if by her indiscretion her family came to know of her liking for him.

“The King’s favorite? Does he not have a friend, that strutting Sir … Overbury? Is it he who admires you but hides behind Carr’s cloak?”