1. Phoebe

P HOEBE Great St Bartholomew's, London, 22nd April (St George's Eve) 1613

T HE STARS WERE HIDDEN at my birth. There was no moon. A tempest rising in the west sent clouds that settled like a veil of black across the night sky, and my father feared this total darkness was a sign of trouble.

The doctor of astrology he summoned reassured him that my future would be fortunate. My stars, although unseen, would serve me well.

Through all that followed after, and with all we lost, my father held those words so closely to his heart they might have been a rope tossed out upon the water to a drowning man. ‘Whatever happens in your life,' he'd often tell me, ‘you'll be guided by the planets and their motions. They will lead you to your destiny.'

I let him keep his fancies.

But this morning, as I stormed across the grass still wet with dew, I felt convinced that any planets guiding me were misaligned. They'd started this day poorly, and since there was truth in the old saying that an ill beginning led to an ill end, I knew my morning would do nothing but get worse.

The front door of our house, though heavy, gave way to my forceful push.

‘He is the most infuriating man.'

I spoke those words to no one but myself as I was entering the kitchen, yet my father and his elder sister – my aunt Agnes – heard me notwithstanding and immediately knew which man I meant.

My father, fitting on his doublet, asked, ‘What has he done to sour thy mood this morning, with the sun so newly up?'

The truth was, Andrew Logan had to do no more than stand within my sight to sour my mood. He'd been our neighbour ten years, since the death of Queen Elizabeth had passed her crown to Scotland's King James, binding both the courts in one and bringing Logan's family south to London in his service. And in all that time I could not think of once my path had crossed with Logan's when he hadn't left me irritated. Nor when I'd been granted the last word.

It was that final point, in truth, that had me most annoyed this morning, because having put the distance of the courtyard between myself and Logan now, my mind could rapidly frame several sharp replies to his last comment, any one of which would have done better than the gaping silence in which I'd watched the big Scotsman's back retreating from my view.

I had been unprepared. I did not often see him at the conduit – most days one of his sisters fetched the water – and hearing the old gardener who came there every morning fawn and laugh and praise him for his drunken misdeeds of the night before had made my temper flare.

I freed my shoulders from the hard yoke with a force that made the pails thump to the floor and told my father all the details, as I'd gleaned them from the gardener's talk, of Logan's violence. Then I said, ‘I merely asked him if, by daylight, he did not feel shame for his attack upon a better man.'

My father's eyebrows lifted. ‘And what did young Logan say to that?'

‘That he would feel no shame for having done what needed doing, and if I stood in defence of Valentine I had his pity.' His contempt, he might have said, for it showed plainly in his eyes while he was speaking, and for one weak moment I had been confused enough to want to ask him why, but then he'd wheeled away abruptly and eventually I'd turned my own back, too, and we had neither of us wasted any further breath in argument.

Aunt Agnes disliked conflict. She brushed the subject away with a move of her hand, as she might wave aside rising smoke from the fire at the hearth where she sat with the linens and hose she was patiently mending. ‘'Tis but words,' she reminded me. ‘Valentine Fox can defend himself.'

‘I know he can,' I said, and trusted my voice sounded confident.

Privately, I was less sure. I'd seen Valentine give a display of his swordsmanship, and with his height and lean form he would make an impressive opponent, but Andrew Logan was built like a great, brainless ox, and in a fight with fists – as it apparently had been last night – the odds fell in his favour.

It was plain he had my father's favour also. ‘Perhaps Valentine provoked him.'

I thought it hardly likely. ‘Pray, when has Andrew Logan needed provocation to begin a fight?'

‘When it would make an enemy of someone who could see him lose his place at court, that's when,' my father said. ‘It is a rare honour to be a King's Messenger, one that no man would lose lightly, and only a very great insult indeed could have made him take such a risk.'

I raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. ‘I'm sure Valentine told him no more than the truth.'

In his place, I'd have thought of a great many things to tell Logan – that he was a bully, for one, and uncultured, and—

‘You think too harshly of the lad,' Aunt Agnes said in her mild tone that held the firmer edge designed to shape my manners into something more polite.

I said nothing, though I might have pointed out that Andrew Logan was a lad no longer. The sullen sixteen-year-old who had come here from Scotland was a grown man now with two more years beneath his belt than my own twenty-four, and at the conduit he had fair towered above me, or so it had seemed. I'd been forced to look up, all the daggers of my own gaze being deflected by his stubborn chin.

Plainly my aunt and father had not faced that side of Logan yet, else I would have more of their sympathy.

My father, for his part, was fully focused now on dressing in a way I had not seen him do in some days, and that fact diverted me from my small inconveniences and minor squabbles.

As he fitted on his hat, the one with the fine feather and the polished gilded clip shaped like a rose, I said, ‘You are called to the palace.'

‘I am.'

‘Then the king has returned?'

‘He has.'

My aunt said, ‘But the Princess Elizabeth has not yet sailed for the continent. You would think her own father might wish to stay by her till her ship leaves, so she's given a proper farewell.'

With one glance, my father reminded his sister the king was not someone to criticize.

Returning his attention to the angle of his hat brim, he asked, ‘What would he gain by standing on the shore and weeping while the ship sails off? It would not make their parting any easier. The king owes no one any such display of his emotions, for it is in truth a private pain, to lose the ones we love.'

Aunt Agnes had no argument to offer, knowing well my father knew that pain himself, and deeply. As did I.

The king had also suffered loss. Of his seven children, only three survived their infancy, and one of those had fallen just this past winter – handsome Prince Henry, the Prince of Wales, pride of our nation – struck down by an illness so sudden the gossips still crouched in their corners and whispered strange theories.

So yes, the king might be forgiven for turning his face from another loss.

Except, ‘The princess has not died,' I told them. ‘She has only married.'

My aunt said idly she saw little difference between death and marriage. ‘I've observed some women wish for death the longer they are married.' She was teasing, but it drew another sidelong look of warning from my father.

‘Agnes,' he rebuked her. ‘Do not fill my daughter's head with nonsense. She will marry a fine man of a good family, who will give her healthy children and—'

‘—a life of ease at court.' I spoke those words with him in unison, an easy thing to do when I had heard them said so frequently. I did not share my father's faith in almanacs and stars, nor in the doctor of astrology who'd cast a figure of the hour of my birth and made that bold prediction.

But I hoped.

For, after all, there was a man to whom I'd given my affection, and he was a fine man of good family, who had risen now so high at court that he could give his wife a life of ease there, if he chose to marry.

As though he had read my thoughts, my father asked, ‘Have you seen Valentine this morning?'

‘No, I've had no reason to.'

My aunt piped in, ‘Besides,'tis barely six o'clock, he will be sleeping, surely.'

‘Not this morning,' said my father. ‘He has business at court also, and he promised I may ride there with him in his coach. Phoebe, would you go across and tell him, please, that I am nearly ready?'

I suspected that my father, in reply to my remark that I'd no reason to see Valentine, was trying now to give me one. I smiled. ‘Of course.'

I might have wished my hair was not arranged so plainly, nor that I had laced my stays so loosely underneath my long-sleeved bodice in a style two seasons out of fashion. But I could at least draw comfort from the knowledge that my fray with Logan would have brought some colour to my cheeks.

‘You're very pretty when you're angry,' Valentine had teased me once.

To his credit, he rarely made me angry.

We'd grown up together, here in St Bartholomew's, within this close community that sat outside the city walls of London, on what once had been the grounds of an old monastery. Nearly fifty years before my birth, when Great King Henry broke with Rome and founded our own Protestant religion here in England, he declared an end to nunneries and monasteries, claimed those buildings for the crown, and gave or sold them into private hands. Thus St Bartholomew's had been transformed.

The church itself remained – its bells still tolled the quarters of our waking hours – but the buildings that the monks had used were fashioned into mansions, and new houses had been built within the walls of the great inner courtyard that we called the Close, with yet more houses built upon the field where every August's end the fair of St Bartholomew brought people thronging, as they had time out of mind, to sell their wares and see the spectacle.

It was a fine address to have. When we'd first come to live here I had scarce believed our fortune. Even then, though I'd been small, the Close had seemed a sanctuary, beautiful and privileged, where several of our neighbours, like my father, worked at court, while others had no need to work at all by virtue of their birth and status.

Valentine's father was such a man. His family owned estates in Wiltshire but he rarely saw them, having argued with his brothers as a younger man and hardened as he aged so he continued unforgiving. That always made me sad, for could I have had my brothers back again I'd not have wasted any moments left to us in arguing, so glad would I have been to have their company.

But Valentine's father never changed his course, once set. There was an order to his life, and to his days. I knew at this hour he would be outdoors patrolling in his gardens, as a military leader might inspect the boundaries of his headquarters.

His mansion was well situated for this purpose, being in what had been designed to be the frater – or great dining hall – for the use of the long-departed monks. A long building of grand proportions, it shielded the church behind it and butted up at right angles to the equally impressive former dormitory, which had also been converted to a mansion of great beauty that formed the far angle at this north end of the Close.

To the other side of the Foxes' mansion, and a stone's throw to the south of it, as though aware it ought to keep itself below its betters and not seek to share their level, lay our own house, less impressive. Yet the bricks still had a solid look and all the shutters had been newly painted and the window glass was catching the new rays of rising sunlight, and as always when I stepped into the Close, I felt a sense of pride.

‘Up early,' Valentine's father said as I came across the green to greet him, which I judged the closest he had come in weeks to giving me a compliment.

I often marvelled he could be so like his son to look at, and yet so completely unlike him in character.

He said, ‘You'll be wanting my son, I expect.' Then, with great disapproval, ‘He's been in a fight.'

I didn't reveal that I'd already heard. Valentine's father disliked gossip as much as Aunt Agnes. Still, I couldn't help but defend Valentine. ‘Then he must have been greatly provoked.'

If I hadn't known better, I might have thought Valentine's father eyed me with something approaching amusement before he collected himself and corrected me. ‘Gentlemen are not provoked by their lessers.'

He glanced past my shoulder, along the green length of the Close, and although I did not turn to follow his gaze I knew where he was looking.

The Logans' house lay, like our own, on the long western edge of Bartholomew's Close, only more to the south, near the conduit. I made a point of not giving it notice.

‘My son's with his friends, in the stables,' said Valentine's father. ‘'Tis not the kindest of company for a young lady, but stop up your ears and you ought to survive.'

And that , I thought, was humour, or his rare attempt at it. I smiled and said, ‘Yes, sir.'

The stables were reached by a passageway hugging the mansion. Built broad enough to take a coach, it opened to the square enclosure of what, in the monastery's time, had been the cloisters. Here the walls and spire of the church loomed high and cast their shadows as though frowning down upon the fate that had befallen the once prayerful, silent walks and archways, turned to use as horses' stalls.

No doubt the church was frowning harder still this morning, I thought, with the language Valentine's close friends were using freely with each other.

There were three of them today. Their numbers changed from time to time, but from the day I had first met him, Valentine had always drawn a following.

It was no more than natural. He looked like every gallant knight I'd seen in tapestries and paintings – tall and sure of step, his golden hair a little wayward with its waves, his beard somehow managing, even when he trimmed it to a close and tidy point, to remain distinctly roguish.

And his eyes – those eyes that made me feel I was the only person in his view – were like the eyes of every hero who, when moved to action, had called men to come along with him, and found a sudden army at his back.

Except this morning, underneath one of those eyes there was faint bruising.

‘Phoebe!' Valentine had noticed my arrival. ‘You look very pretty this morning.' His eyebrows raised as I came close. ‘And very irritated.'

‘Not at you,' I promised. ‘I do think of Andrew Logan.'

‘Why does he deserve your thoughts?'

‘Because of this.' I raised my hand to lightly touch the bruise beneath his left eye. ‘Does it hurt?'

‘I feel it not at all, when you do that.' He smiled, then asked, ‘What makes you think that it is Logan's work?'

‘Because I heard him talking at the conduit this morning to the gardener, who was praising him for last night's fighting.'

‘Then you know what happened?'

‘Only that you were attacked by Logan and his companions, and that your friends bravely took your part.'

Looking at his friends now, it appeared they'd paid a price for that decision. One, much bruised, was leaning heavily against the coach while waiting for the groom to finish harnessing the horses, while another held a bandaged arm close-cradled to his chest, and the third was already within the coach, where shadows only half concealed his lounging and defeated pose and bandaged hands.

Turning my attention back to Valentine, I said, ‘I'm sorry you were made to fight. Could it not be avoided?'

‘Not by me. Did not the gardener touch on how the fight began, when he was talking at the conduit?'

‘The gardener took Logan's part, and seemed glad you'd been challenged.'

‘Oh? What did the gardener say, exactly?'

All the words were clear and stinging in my mind, and easy to recall. ‘He said that Logan had just done the Close a service, because you'd long needed to be taken down a peg.' I frowned. ‘Why did it start? The fight, I mean.'

‘'Tis not for gentle ears to hear the insult that began it.' Over the years, Valentine had often regaled me with tales of the ungentlemanly brawls he'd witnessed Logan fight in. That this latest one was too heinous for Valentine to describe told me much. He smiled slightly. ‘But I've not been taken down, as you can see. I am yet standing.' Glancing from me to his friends, he added, ‘And I'm late to court.'

That nudged my memory. ‘I am sent to tell you that my father's nearly ready.' Then, because his face remained uncomprehending, I said, ‘You did say that he could ride to court this morning in your coach.'

‘I did.' His turn to frown.

He knew as well as I did that my father's health had faltered these past months. It was not common knowledge, but I'd shared with Valentine how I had seen my father several times appear to lose his breath while walking, and once stumble in the road, and once drop in a near faint after a long day of business, which he blamed upon a want of sleep.

I could feel my temper rising for the second time this morning. ‘You promised him.' I let the sharper edges of my tone show through. ‘A promise is a promise.'

‘So it is. But thanks to Logan, we've no room, the coach is full. My friends are injured and must ride within. They are the sons of noblemen,' he told me.

‘But my father does not merit your attention.' I did not try to hide the sarcasm that edged my tone.

‘I've angered you.'

‘You are not often selfish. Nor did the favour of noblemen's sons used to make you forget your word.'

‘Phoebe.' His eyes asked for my understanding. ‘They are also friends of my lord Rochester, my patron. I would lose my place at court were I to leave them unattended. And if I lose my place at court, what future could there be for us?' He bent to kiss my cheek but I was turning from him, so the touch was brief. He told me, ‘Give your father my regrets. He'll understand.'

He did, of course. My father was an understanding man.

He stood with me outside our door and watched the coach departing, having heard it pass. It travelled down the Close, past Logan's house, and out the gate into the labyrinth of lanes and streets that lay beyond.

‘Ah, well,' my father told me, ‘I've no doubt your uncle at St Paul's will have room in his coach for me. I have time left to catch him, and'tis not so far to walk.'

Too far, still, for my comfort.

Pushing down my disappointment in what Valentine had done, I said, ‘I'll come with you.' And when my father looked at me as though I were proposing to run off to the New World, I added, ‘Only to St Paul's. It has been too long since I've seen my uncle.'

‘And how will you get safely home?'

‘He has so many servants, one of them can be my escort.'

He agreed to this, to my relief, but only after he took from his pocket the crisp copy of his almanac. My aunt considered almanacs a needless waste of pennies, but my father bought a new one every year, to guide his actions. At the stationer's, he'd carefully survey the different almanacs, each named for their compiler. His favourites were those of one Mr Parker, whose predictions for the year were drawn more closely from astrology and who, beside the listing for each month, with all its days of feasts and festivals and forecasts of the weather, left a blank page for the user's daily notes and jottings. Mr Parker's almanac provided tables of the tides, the time each day of sunrise, and the aspects of the moon. But to my father, the most useful feature of the little book was that it warned him in advance which dates would bring him luck, and which he should approach with caution.

‘No,' my father said, ‘there is no "D" for danger marked beside this day, so we may safely walk abroad.'

I made no reply at first, because I'd been distracted by a black and white bird settling on the tiles of the roof directly opposite. A magpie.

My Aunt Agnes, had she been here, would have thrown a stone to chase it off, and then she'd have recited prayers to counteract its evil.

As I met the bird's unblinking eyes, I understood that impulse. But it was only a bird, and to imagine it as more than that – to think it truly might be an ill omen – would be like thinking Mr Parker's almanac was accurate.

My father nudged me. ‘Phoebe? Did you hear me? Mr Parker says today will bring us no misfortune.'

‘Good.' I smiled, and linked my arm with his, as much to steady him as from affection.

But as we walked on, I couldn't help but feel the black eyes of that lurking magpie watching us, as steady as a stone.