over to the bed and pulled back the covers. Although her limbs sagged with fatigue, she had little desire to climb into it, knowing it would offer no repose. Instead, she would lie there for hours, as she had every night since Tom’s death, waiting for the dawn.
Frances drew a sharp breath as she lowered her feet through the icy water until they brushed against the smooth pebbles of the riverbed. Her skin looked white, almost translucent, beneath the surface.
A tiny fluttering in her stomach made her sit up straight on the grass. She laid her hands gently over it and waited. There was the movement again, stronger this time. She smiled, then stroked the neat, warm swelling that lay beneath the stiff fabric of her dress. Ellen had been obliged to loosen her stays last week, and though her body was still slender, there was no longer any disguising her growing belly.
The surge of joy she had felt when the child moved dissipated as she recalled the angry words she had exchanged with her brother Edward the night before. He had returned to Longford the previous summer, having at last completed his studies in Cambridge. She guessed that Theo, who was still there, had proved something of a distraction. With just a year separating her two brothers, they had always been close. She could remember many occasions when, as children, they had run off into the woods straight after breakfast, only returning as the light was fading. Her mother had chided them for missing their lessons, and for their dishevelled state, cuts and grazes on their skin, their fine linen shirts spattered with mud.
How different Edward was now. Frances had noticed the change as soon as she had arrived two weeks before. It wasn’t so much physical – though he had certainly grown into a tall, muscular young man – but rather in his manner. There had been something distant in the way he had bent to kiss her, his eyes coolly appraising. As the second son, he had enjoyed a carefree youth, with no expectations of inheritance. But the death of their elder brother, Francis, had changed that. Edward, then aged seventeen, had shared his siblings’ shock and grief, but Frances would always recall seeing excitement in his eyes, even as their father told them the news, his voice cracked with sorrow.
Edward had left for Cambridge soon afterwards, and Frances had seen little of him, or her three other brothers, since. But now it was clear that he revelled in his status as heir to the Longford estate.
Her thoughts were disturbed by a movement at the edge of her vision – her old nurse, Ellen, walking slowly over the bridge. She stopped to rub her back, then plodded on, wincing at the pain in her hip. It had grown a good deal worse since Frances had last seen her almost two years before. Ellen had been standing on the threshold of the castle as Frances’s carriage had made its steady progress along the drive a fortnight ago. Frances had felt the bones of Ellen’s shoulders as her nurse had embraced her. She had tried to hide her dismay at the sight of Ellen’s grey hair and pinched, sagging skin. In those two years, she had become an old woman.
It seemed to Frances as if a lifetime had passed since she had last sat here by the Avon, in the shade of her beloved home. She herself had changed, she knew. How naïve – arrogant, even – she had been when she had first arrived at Whitehall Palace a year after King James’s accession. Despite her mother’s warning, she had made little effort to conceal her skills at healing, as if the herbs could somehow protect her from the evil that pervaded the new king’s court. She had soon learned, to her cost, that they were as nothing against his perverted obsessions or the twisted schemes of his closest adviser.
Cecil.
Frances felt the familiar loathing at the thought of the king’s crook-backed minister. He had been a constant, menacing presence throughout her time at court. Even in the privacy of her lodgings, she had felt his eyes upon her. He had conspired in her arrest for witchcraft, had watched, impervious to her screams, as the torturer had searched her body intimately for the Devil’s Mark. She remembered the elation she had felt upon hearing that Tom and his fellow plotters had succeeded: that Cecil had been blown to the heavens, along with the king and his entire parliament. But the news had proved false. Fawkes had been discovered with the gunpowder just hours before the lords assembled in the ancient hall above.
Frances shook her head as if to dispel the thoughts that she knew would follow. Of Tom, his body racked with pain, being pulled along to his death.
‘Wintour looked as pale as a dead man when he mounted the scaffold,’ she had heard someone say as, a few days later, she had hastened through the public rooms of the palace, desperate to avoid the subject that was on everyone’s lips.
‘Fear makes cowards of us all,’ another had responded. Frances had rounded on them then, all of the grief she had tried to contain spilling out in her fury.
‘Are you well, my lady?’
Ellen’s brow was creased with concern. She was breathing heavily from the exertion of her walk. Frances gave a weak smile of reassurance. ‘Do not trouble yourself, Ellen. I am quite well, thank you.’
Her gaze moved to the basket that the older woman had set down upon the grass. ‘Were you able to find the willow bark, and the hyssop?’ she asked.
Ellen nodded as she sank down next to her. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘though I searched in the woods a long time. My eyes are not as sharp as they were, so I had to stoop down on my knees.’ She kneaded them as she spoke.
Frances suppressed her impatience. ‘I am sorry for it, Ellen, but with the herbs you have gathered I will make you a salve to ease your aching limbs.’ She paused. ‘I wish I could have gone myself.’
Ellen clicked her tongue in disapproval. ‘And risk your secret being discovered?’ she demanded, then gave a sigh and reached over to pat Frances’s hand. ‘You know you must have a care, now that your young knave is starting to show himself.’ Her voice was softer now.
‘It might be a girl,’ Frances pointed out.
Ellen shook her head. ‘Not when you carry the child like that, all at the front.’
They sat in companionable silence for a few moments. Frances watched as a hawk circled over the woods, dipping down now and again as it sought its prey. How she longed to be among the ancient oaks, to smell the sweet scent of the primroses, which she knew would be in bloom now. Though she cherished her home, it had felt more like a prison this past week. She chided herself for the thought. Her only solace during the long days and nights that followed Tom’s death had been the prospect of returning to Longford. Now she was here, yet the restlessness and misery still hung over her.
‘The pain of parting will lessen in time,’ Ellen said, as if reading her thoughts. Frances opened her mouth to reply, but the older woman continued: ‘I do not ask you to name him. I respect your parents’ wishes, and would not vex you by pressing the matter – not for the world. Whatever the reason you have returned here unmarried, yet with child, I will not attempt to discover it. I want only to care for you, when the time comes—’ She broke off, her eyes glistening with tears.
Frances swallowed her own. She had wept so much these past weeks that she wondered there could be any tears left. But soon she must go in for dinner, and she was determined to avoid her brother’s scorn by concealing her grief.
‘Thank you, Ellen,’ she said
