Half the things we need are left behind at Wingfield and I cannot buy fresh vegetables for love or money in a radius of twenty miles. The countryside is exhausted and the men have run off to join the Northern army, which is mustering at Brancepath under the Earl of Westmorland, swearing loyalty to the Scots queen and a holy war for the Church of Rome. The country is on a war footing already, and when I send my steward to market he says they will sell him nothing; he feels as if he is the enemy.

It is terrifying to think that out there, in the wilderness of the North, there are squires and gentry and lords calling their tenants together, mustering their friends, arming their followers, and telling them to march under the banner of the five wounds of Christ to find me, to come to my house, to free my prisoner. I wake in the night at the slightest noise; in the day I am forever climbing to the castle wall to look out over the road; continually I see a cloud of dust and think it is them coming.

I have lived all my life as a private woman, on good terms with my neighbors, a good landlord to my tenants, a fair employer. Now I find myself at odds with my own people. I don’t know who is a secret enemy. I don’t know who would free the queen if they could, who would come against me if they dared. It makes me feel like a stranger in my own land, a newcomer in my own country. The people whom I think of as my friends and neighbors may be on the other side, may be against me, may even be my enemies. My friends, even my kin, may take arms against me, may see me as a traitor to the true queen, my prisoner.

She herself is demure, like a novice in a convent, with an escape plan hidden in her sleeve, and my husband trustingly remarks to me, “Thank God that she has not tried to break free. At least she knows nothing about the uprising.”

For the first time in my married life I look at him and I think: “Fool.”

It is a bad moment when a wife thinks her husband a fool. I have had four husbands and I have had bad moments with all of them, but I have never before been married to a man whose stupidity could cost me my houses and my wealth.