“Not to the likes of us,” he said shortly. “We’re not grand enough for him. We don’t pay enough in tithes for him to come out to us. The chaplain at the Priory, that Mr. Summer, he’d have come for asking. He came out for free, came twice.”

Alinor flushed scarlet at his name. “Did he?” she asked. She thought that anyone would be able to hear the love in her voice. “Did he go to people for free?”

“He came and prayed with her.” William shifted his feet. “Old prayers,” he said. “Those that she likes. Probably not allowed now. But she was that ill . . .”

“Anyway, Mr. Summer has gone away,” Alinor said.

“Aye. But he left his Prayer Book here. He said she could hold it in her hand if there was no one that could read them. He said to keep it hidden, but she could hold it if it comforted her.”

“Did he?” She was swept by a longing to see anything that had belonged to James.

“He said anyone could read the prayers to her. You’re a midwife, you could say them, couldn’t you? It would be as good as a minister?”

“I can say them,” Alinor offered. “I could read them from his book. It wouldn’t be as good as him, but it’s his prayers.”

She went back to the fireside with some brandy in an earthenware cup, added a tincture of fennel, and topped it up with hot water from the pot that stood on a trivet by the fire.

Greedily, the old lady took it into her hands, wrapping her cold fingers around the cup. “Now,” she said. “Now I’m ready.”

Alinor took up James’s missal and started to spell out the beautiful old words in Latin, not knowing what they meant; but hearing the music of the sounds, knowing that he would have known them by heart, knowing that this was his faith and his God, believing that his child in her belly could perhaps hear them and feeling closer to him now, reading the office for the dying to an old lady, than she had been in all the long weeks that he had been away.

LONDON, DECEMBER 1648

James, not knowing that his prayers were being whispered by the woman he loved, went quietly through the darkened streets of the city of London, keeping to the center of the street, picking his way through the frozen muck and rubbish rather than risk walking close to the dark doorways and shadows. He turned into a grand gateway and nodded to the silent watchman, and then went down the side of the house where a single lantern was hung on a bent nail outside a narrow door.

The door opened easily when he turned the ring of the handle, and he stepped into a stone-flagged corridor, which led to the kitchen one way and to the great hall of the house the other. Before him was a small storeroom with a lighted candle on the table. James went in and seated himself at the scrubbed table.