I can’t even see my little sister Mary, who is with my mother in our London house, Suffolk Place. I don’t see anybody except my father-in-law and my so-called husband at dinner and at chapel, where we pray four times a day, whispering strange words over and over again in the candlelit dusk. They don’t speak to me then, but my father-in-law looks at me as if he is surprised I am still there, and he can’t quite remember why.

I give him no cause for complaint. I am as devout as if I were an enclosed nun—a very reluctant enclosed nun. It’s not my fault! I was born and bred into the reformed religion and I learned Latin for my studies, not to mutter with a priest. I know grammar, but I never learned the prayers by rote. So the psalms and the blessings are as meaningless to me as if they were in Hebrew. I keep my head down and I mutter pious-sounding noises. I bob up and down and cross myself when everyone else does. If I were not so terribly sad, I would be bored to death. When they tell me quietly, just before Matins, that my father has been beheaded with the other traitors, I feel more exhausted than unhappy, and I don’t know what prayers should be said for him. I think that since Queen Mary is on the throne, he must have gone to purgatory and we should buy Masses for his soul, but I don’t know where you would buy Masses while the abbeys are still closed, and if they would do him any good, when Jane said there was no such place as purgatory anyway.

I feel only how very, very tiring this all is, and all I really care about is when can I go out, and if I will ever be happy again. I think this must mean that I am, as Jane said, totally without the gift of the Holy Spirit, and for a moment I think I shall tell her that she is right and I am a very worldly ninny, but inexplicably sad; and then I remember that I shall never tell her anything, ever again, and I remember that is why I am sad.

* * *