Lucy comes to me, white-faced, and tells me that her mother, who lives outside the walls of the Tower and does my washing, has taken to her bed. She has the terrible swelling in her armpits and the buboes in her groin that indicate the plague. Lucy is shaking with fear. “She washed your linen only yesterday,” she says. “I brought it in myself. I put it on the baby.” She is trembling with distress. “God spare us, your ladyship. I would never have done it! I did not know! What if the baby takes the plague?”

Lucy’s home is nailed up and marked with a red cross on the door. Lucy is not allowed in to see her mother; everyone is barred out. The sick woman tosses and turns on her bed, alone in her house. She will live or die in a lonely vigil; but she knows that she is most likely to die, and her daughter cannot even take her a mug of clean water. Sufferers with the plague pray for death as their fever rises and the swellings on their body make them cry with pain, but nobody can go to them.

“I have not seen my brother,” Lucy says fretfully. “He’s in service to the Duke of Norfolk.”

“Then perhaps he’s out of the city with the court,” I say helplessly. “Perhaps they’re safe at Windsor with the queen.”

“Shall I take the baby’s linen off again? And wash it again?”

My newborn child has been in linen from a plague house for half the day. “Yes, do,” I say uncertainly, “and burn herbs, Lucy, at the doorway and windows.”

Elizabeth, the heartless queen, takes no risks with her own health, though she leaves me and my little boys in the heart of the pestilential city. She locks herself up at Windsor Castle, and no one is allowed to go from London to her court. She even has a gallows built on the edge of the town to hang anyone who dares to approach. A gate and her giant sergeant porter is not enough for Elizabeth—she has to be guarded by a hangman—but she leaves me and my babies here, in the most diseased place in England.