I visited Frankie as soon as I and the children were sufficiently recovered. As usual, her apartments were busy. The summer progress was over for most, although Arthur was still away. I was shown into the receiving room, which Frankie had redecorated during my illness; the paneling had been ripped out and replaced with red leather, deeply tooled in repeating gold patterns, and matching gilded leather covered the seats of the chairs. In one corner, four men were hanging a large painting. I put my nose to the wall to inhale the scent of hides dyed in Cordova, stamped with gold in Granada, cities I would never see. There were fewer than five families in the land who could afford the luxury Frankie displayed in that room and yet, thanks to our friendship, I was admitted to that paradise. Even though she was a Howard, I did wonder how she had paid for it. Which tradesman would be fool enough to trust Frankie’s promises of future payment? For a brief moment, I felt my heart grow cold, like a dying ember. Was I not doing the same as these credulous tradesmen? Investing my time and hopes in her?

“Whatever are you doing?” she said, approaching soundlessly across new woven rushes, accompanied by her little dog Brutus and Purkoy, now much grown and hardly a puppy. Around her neck was a long golden chain, set with enameled flowers and precious stones, that I had not seen before. Indeed, her every surface gleamed; I felt sympathy for those saps with their gilded-leather samples, they would have been lost the moment they saw her. “Have you found a fault?”

“No, I was…” I could not admit to sniffing walls.

Frankie embraced me and then stood back a pace, to study me. “Are you quite well again? You are grown thin.”

“I will fatten up. I have to tell you, Frankie, Simon Forman is dead.”

She stared at me, uncomprehending.

“How can he be?” she asked, and I understood her confusion. Forman was so close to the angels that it was a shock to think they had taken him.

“He predicted it,” I said. “He told his wife at supper one evening that he would be dead within three days. She twit him in the teeth as he sat there full brimming with life, but he was right. He went out on the river to a warehouse in which he had an interest, suddenly stood up in the boat, then fell down dead.”

“We will miss him.”

“When I was with him, it felt as if George were still alive.”

Frankie nodded and took my hands. She squeezed and rubbed life back into them, for they are always cold.