That is no surprise. Father says our house used to be the chapel, in the long-ago days when the old monastery still stood on these lands. For miles around, the buildings and farms of the abbey stretched up through the hills until the distant spot where the planting fields end and the line of the forest begins. For five hundred years these fertile acres teemed with people and animals and life. No more, though. Now Father and I live in the chapel; the rest of the monastery is rubble, and all the Catholics are in Ireland and France.

Sometimes, when the weather is fair, I lie on my back in the grass of a nearby field. I close my eyes and try to imagine that last, terrible day, in the hours before it was all laid waste. But even the grandfather of the oldest person in the town of Alnwick was not alive to see it. There is no one who can tell me what it was like to hide at the edge of the forest, as I imagine I would have done, watching in terror and fascination as the king’s soldiers smashed the ancient buildings to bits and then hunted down the fleeing monks like so many helpless rabbits.

Father often says he wishes they had torn down the chapel and left the monk’s library standing instead, but I like our home just as it is, a long, rectangular structure made of rough-hewn blocks of stone. Long ago Father divided the interior into rooms. My bedchamber is small and up a long flight of stairs, in the old bell tower. On the main floor is a bedchamber for Father, a study in which he does his work, and a front parlor where we take our meals. It is where I write my garden diary, too, at the end of each day’s labors.

Of all these rooms, the parlor is the largest, and the one that still looks most like a church. There is a high, vaulted ceiling, and tall arched windows that Father says once had stained-glass pictures in them. Now they are filled with thick, plain glass that is divided into many small panes. On sunny days the light slants through the panes and makes narrow, glowing path ways across the dark wood planks of the floor.

I used to play hopscotch with those paths of light when I was small—if I leap over the light without touching it, Mama will live, I would say to myself. But if my foot touches the light she will die.

My foot never, ever touched the light—to this day I will swear it—but Mama died anyway.

Oh, how I wept! I was only four, so perhaps the outburst can be forgiven. But I remember how Father’s voice stayed calm.