“It gave me a bit of a shock when you told me that,” Lucy admitted.

“Yeah,” Finn said, “I noticed.” A smile crept into his eyes. “So I have to accept that there’s more to life than we can explain, difficult as that is for me as someone who likes empirical proof of everything.” He shook his head as though the thought, and his own acceptance of it, still sat a little uncomfortably with him.

“Well, spare a thought for me,” Lucy said with feeling. “Before this all started, the closest I’d come to a supernatural experience was Cleo trying to read my aura.”

“I spare plenty of thoughts for you,” Finn said and before Lucy could respond he strode out of the kitchen.

Eighteen

Anne Catesby

Ashby St. Ledgers, Northamptonshire
Spring, 1600

Thomas came to visit us at Ashby in the spring of the following year. He came on a bright April day when the laundry dried on the hedges and Robbie played with his hobby horse under the tutelage of one of the grooms and his nursemaid.

“The boy flourishes here.” Thomas came over to me at the mullioned window of the parlor as I stood looking out. “He has found a new home and, God willing, happiness.” He took my hand and pressed a kiss to it. “You have done that for him, Nan.”

“I hope so,” I said. Even now, tears pricked my eyes when I thought of all that Robbie had lost. “It helps in a way that he barely remembers his mother, hard as that may seem,” I said. “I tell him about her, of course, and he has a picture of her likeness. But perhaps it’s for the best.”

Thomas nodded. “And his father?”

“Robert came to see us a month or two back.” I felt a stirring of the old resentment. My son seemed to spend much time with his kin the Wintours and with Francis, Thomas’s son, much more time than he did at Ashby.

“He seems much preoccupied with matters of religion and politics,” Thomas murmured. His dark gaze searched my face. “I imagine it must be causing you some concern.”

I offered him a glass of wine and gestured to him to take a seat but he chose to remain standing, close enough to me for me to be rather too aware of him. The two of us, alone, looking out at our grandson playing in the yard... There was an intimacy there, an entwining of lives that made me uncomfortable. I handed him the glass and made sure I did not touch him in the process. My nerves were already sufficiently on edge.

“If only Robert would concern himself with religion in the private rather than the public sphere I should be content enough,” I admitted. Unlike his father and me, it was not sufficient for Robert to worship quietly, to give succor and sometimes a hiding place to a Catholic priest or to fund his ministry. No, Robert had to proclaim his faith as a challenge to the authorities and demand greater rights for those of us who followed the true religion. He was drawing attention and that scared me.