“That is unfair, Robert.” I was still calm though my heart pounded at the unkindness of his words. “What I wanted was always for you to be safe, and happy, as you were with Catherine.”

He inclined his head in acknowledgment. “And now that time has gone,” he said. He turned toward the door.

“Wait,” I called, and he paused. “You will come and visit Robbie at Ashby, I hope,” I said. “And me as well?”

Robert smiled then. “I will come,” he said, “but for now I have work to do. I am for London.”

I wanted to beg him to stay, to rest a little, to let me care for him, but I knew he would not allow it. If there was any solace to be found, Robert would find it in action, not in the places where he had been so briefly happy. I wondered whether he might seek out Thomas at Lyveden to talk to him of his grief, but I knew better than to ask that and better than to resent it. If Thomas could help Robert put his shattered soul back together then I could only be grateful and happy for it. As for the action he planned to take, I refused to worry about that now that I had my grandson to care for.

When the door had closed behind Robert I pressed a kiss on the hair of his sleeping son. “I will care for you,” I vowed. “I will talk to you about your mother, and love you as much as she did, and honor her memory.” And he turned closer to me in his sleep and grasped my hand in his smaller one and in that second, he lodged so tight in my heart I knew I would go through hell and high water to protect him forever.

Later, when Robert had left for London and I had set the servants once more about their duties and the house was calm and quiet again, I sent for Byram. Dawn was breaking, a streak of pewter across the autumn sky. The steward, clearly embarrassed by his earlier desertion of his post, told me that he had sent out a messenger to Sir Thomas Leigh to notify him of his daughter’s death, and that a man had gone to Lyveden as well to tell Sir Thomas Tresham on Robert’s orders. The village carpenter, he added, would prepare a coffin that day for Mistress Catherine and the women were waiting to dress her body and prepare her shroud with herbs and flowers. I knew that this miserable task would also fall to me to oversee in Robert’s absence and as Catherine had no other female relatives in the house. It was important to perform the appropriate rites before too much time had passed. But I wondered whether Catherine would have wished to be buried at Knightstone, which I knew she had loved, or whether her father would deem it more appropriate for her to return to Stoneleigh. There was so much to do of grief and mourning and I had so recently done the same for my own husband. I felt weary and grief-stricken deep into my bones.