He was too young a man to take the responsibility of keeping a family safe in such difficult and dangerous times. He was studying his skill as a physician, every day he had to advise men and women who were staring death in the face. He did not want to come home at night to a coven of women torn apart by malice and envy.

So I held my tongue and when his sisters were witty at my expense, or even openly critical of the bread I had bought at market, of my wasteful kitchen practices, of the printers’ ink on my hands, of my books on the kitchen table, I said nothing. I had been at court and seen the ladies in waiting vying for the attention of the queen. I knew all about female malice, I had just never thought that I would have to live with it at home.

My father saw some of it and tried to protect me. He found me translation work to do, and I would sit at the bookshop counter and work from Latin to English or from English to French while the smell of the ink from the press drifted in reassuringly from the yard outside. Sometimes I helped him to print, but the complaints from Mrs Carpenter if I got ink on my apron or, worse, on my gown, were so extreme that both my father and I tried to avoid arousing her indignation.

As the summer wore on and Daniel’s mother gave me the pick of the food, the breast of the scrawny French chickens, the fattest sweetest peaches, I realised that she was waiting for me to speak to her. In the last days of August she could not bear to wait any longer.

‘Have you got something to tell me, daughter?’ she asked.

I felt myself stiffen. I always flinched when she called me ‘daughter’. I never wanted another mother but the one who bore me. In truth, I thought it an impertinence of this unloveable woman to try to claim me for her own. I was my mother’s child and not hers, and if I had wanted any other mother then I would have chosen the queen who had laid my head in her lap, and stroked my curls and told me that she trusted me.

Besides, I knew Daniel’s mother now. I had not observed her for the whole of the summer without learning her particular route to things. If she called me ‘daughter’ or praised how I had combed my hair under my cap she was after something: information, a promise, some kind of intimacy. I looked at her without a glimmer of a smile, and waited.

‘Something to tell me?’ she prompted. ‘A little news that would make an old woman very, very happy?’

I realised what she was after. ‘No,’ I said shortly.

‘Not yet sure?’

‘Sure I am not with child, if that is what you mean,’ I said flatly. ‘I had my course two weeks ago. Did you want to know anything more?’