I loved Patrick Ive with every bone and muscle in my body. I tried not to. I was engaged to be married to Sam Kidd when I first started working for Patrick—as his bedder, at Saviour College in Cambridge, where he studied. I liked Sam well enough, but my heart belonged to Patrick within a few weeks of first meeting him, and I knew that no amount of trying to feel differently would change that. Patrick was everything good that a person could be. He was fond of me, but to him I was only a servant. Even after I learned to speak like the daughter of a master of a Cambridge college—like Frances Ive—I remained, in Patrick’s eyes, a loyal servant and nothing more.

Of course I knew about him and Nancy Ducane. I overheard some of his conversations with her that I wasn’t supposed to. I knew how much he loved her, and I couldn’t bear it. I had long ago accepted that he belonged to Frances and not to me, but it was intolerable to discover that he had fallen in love with a woman who was not his wife and that that woman was not me.

For a few fleeting seconds—no longer—I wanted to punish him. To cause him grievous hurt of the kind that he had caused me. So I made up a wicked lie about him and, God forgive me, I told that lie to Harriet Sippel. It comforted me for as long as I was telling it: the idea that Patrick’s whispered words of love for Nancy—words I had overheard more than once—were not his but the late William Ducane’s, conveyed from beyond the grave. Oh, I knew it was nonsense, but when I told Harriet Sippel, for a few seconds it felt true.

Then Harriet set to work, saying dreadful, unforgivable things about Patrick all over the village—and Ida and Richard helped her, which I never understood. They must have known what a venomous creature she had become; everyone in the village knew. How could they turn on Patrick and ally themselves with her? Oh, I know the answer: it was my fault. Richard and Ida knew that the rumor did not come from Harriet in the first place but from a servant girl who had always been loyal to Patrick and who was seen as having no reason to lie.