‘It must be forgotten,’ I said. ‘In time.’

‘No, why?’ she said. ‘We remembered Zion by the rivers of Babylon, we remember Zion in the gates of Calais. Why should we ever forget?’

Daniel did not ask me if I would forgive him and if we could start again as man and wife. He did not ask me if I was longing for a touch, for a kiss, longing to feel alive like a young woman in springtime and not always like a girl fighting against the world. He did not ask me if I felt, since my father was dead, that I was terribly alone in the world, and that I would always be Hannah alone, neither of the People, nor a wife, and now, not even a daughter. He did not ask me these things, I did not volunteer them, and so we parted kindly on my doorstep, with a sense of sadness and regret, and I imagine he went home and called on the way at the house of the plump fair-haired mother of his son, and I went into my house and closed my door and sat in darkness for a long time.

* * *

The cold months were always hard for me, my Spanish blood was still too thin for the damp days of a northern coastal winter, and Calais was little better than London had been under driving rain and grey skies. Without my father I felt as if some of the chill of the sea and the skies had crept into the very blood of my veins, and into my eyes, since I wept unaccountably for no reason. I gave up dining properly, but ate like a printer’s lad with a hacked-off slice of bread in one hand and a cup of milk in the other. I did not observe the dietary restrictions as my father liked us to do, I did not light the candle for the Sabbath. I worked on the Sabbath, and I printed secular books and jest books and texts of plays and poems as if learning did not matter any more. I let my faith drift away with my hopes of happiness.

I could not sleep well at night but during the day I could hardly set type for yawning. Trade in the shop was slow; when the times were so uncertain no-one cared for any books except prayer books. Many times I went down to the harbour and greeted travellers coming from London and asked them for news, thinking that perhaps I should go back to England and see if the queen would forgive me and welcome me back to her service.

The news they brought from England was as dark as the afternoon skies. King Philip was visiting his wife in London but he had brought her little joy, and everyone said he had only gone home to see what he could have from her. There was some vile gossip that he had taken his mistress with him and they danced every day under the queen’s tortured gaze. She would have had to sit on her throne and see him laughing and dancing with another woman, and then endure him raging against her council who were dragging their heels in the war against France.