“Would you like me to speak with him?” Thomas asked. “I could counsel discretion—in the absence of his father and with an uncle’s concern?”

“I should be grateful,” I said, guardedly. It went against the grain with me to ask Thomas for help, but I had learned much in the past ten years; now my sole concern was for Robbie, that he should have a safe and happy upbringing and as good a start in life as I could provide. If Thomas could guide Robert toward moderation in his behavior then I could live with that and with the fact that my son would not listen to me. I had no desire to quarrel with him any further. We preserved the most fragile of peace for Robbie’s sake.

Thomas nodded. “I will do my best.”

“Thank you,” I said. I hesitated. “You know, of course, that Robert has accepted loans from his father-in-law, Sir Thomas Leigh, and a number of others,” I added. “I believe he may have offered Chastleton as surety.”

“I had heard as much.” Thomas looked grave. “It is good of Sir Thomas to offer him aid out of kinship, but I might have known there would be a price attached.”

I shrugged tiredly. Chastleton had been in the Catesby family for several generations; I would be sad to see the estates that my husband had worked so hard to build up diminished, but I sensed that was how the wind was blowing.

In truth it was so much worse than I had anticipated. As the new century took its first tentative steps, the queen was ailing and there was a sense of unrest and discontent in the land. Thomas sent me word that Robert was deeply implicated in a plot hatched by the Earl of Essex to take the Tower, the city and the court, and overthrow Sir Robert Cecil, the queen’s advisor. The messenger found me in the still room where I was stuffing linen bags with the previous year’s dried lavender; to this day I still associate the smell of the herb with that sickening lurch of the heart when I opened the missive.

Had I had the chance to speak to Robert I would have asked him to cite how frequently a rebellion was successful; hotheaded men, I thought wearily, seldom seemed to learn from history and always seemed to believe that this time would be different. It never was. Essex and his coconspirators were captured, the ringleaders executed and Robert and the rest thrown into the debtor’s prison at Wood Street. He sent word to me that his fine was four thousand marks. It was a huge sum; in despair I sold the last of our silver and plate, and some of the jewels that William had given me. They were only modest and of little value but we did what we could.

Thomas came a month after the rebellion was foiled. It was March and the catkins shook on the trees in the spring gales. The wind whistled down through the gaps in the walls and windows of Ashby and I felt old and aching.