I stormed from the house and across the marketplace, not seeing the stalls and the usual traders. I made my way across the fish quay, not even hearing the catcalls of the fishermen at my rapid pace and my uncovered head. I came to the door of the physician’s house in a rush and then realized that I could not hammer on it and demand to see Daniel. I would have to wait. I hitched myself up on to a low stone wall of the opposite house and settled down to wait for him. When passersby smiled or winked at me I glared at them, brazen, as if I were in my lad’s clothes again and had forgotten how to smooth down my skirts and cast down my eyes.

I did not consider what I would say to him, nor did I plan what I might do. I just waited like a dog waits for his master. I just waited in pain, as a dog will do with its paw caught in a trap and there is nothing to do but to wait; not understanding what the pain is, not knowing what can be done. Just enduring. Just waiting.

I heard the clock strike four and then half past before the side door opened and Daniel came out, calling a farewell and closing the door behind him. He had a flask of some green liquid in one hand, and when he came to the gate he started in the wrong direction, away from home. I was in a sudden terror that he was going to visit his lover, and that I, like some suspicious wife, would be caught spying on him. At once I crossed the road and ran up to him.

“Daniel!”

“Hannah!” His pleasure in seeing me was unfeigned. But after one glance at my white face he said: “Is there something wrong? Are you ill?”

“No,” I said, my lip trembling. “I just wanted to see you.”

“And now you do,” he said easily. He drew my hand through his arm. “I have to take this to Widow Jerrin’s house, will you come with me?”

I nodded, and fell into step beside him. I could not keep up. The fullness of my petticoats under my gown prevented me from striding out as I had done when I was a pageboy. I lifted my skirts out to one side but they still hobbled me as if I was a mare, hog-tied in the horse-breaking ring. Daniel slowed down and we walked in silence. He stole a glance at me and guessed from my grim expression that all was not well, but he decided to deal first with the delivery of the medicine.

The widow’s house was one of the older buildings inside the crisscrossing streets of the old town. The houses were packed in under the sheltering bulk of the castle, all the little alleyways overshadowed by the jutting first storeys of the houses that lined them, running north and south and intersected by the next road going east-west.

“When we first came here, I thought I would never find my way round,” he said, making conversation. “And then I learned the names of the taverns. This has been an English town for two hundred years, remember. Every street corner has a ‘Bush’ or a ‘Pig and Whistle’ or a ‘Travelers Rest.’ This street has a tavern called ‘The Hollybush.’ There it is.” He pointed to the building with a battered sign swinging outside it.

“I’ll only be a moment.” He turned to a narrow doorway and tapped on the door.

“Ah, Dr. Daniel!” came a woman’s croaking voice from within. “Come in, come in!”

“Ma’am, I cannot,” he said with his easy smile. “My wife is waiting for me and I will walk home with her.”

There was a laugh from inside the house and a remark that she was a lucky girl to have him, and then Daniel emerged, pocketing a coin.

“Now,” he said. “Shall I walk you home around the city walls, m’lady? Get a breath of sea air?”

I tried to smile at him but I was too heartsore. I let him lead me to the end of the street and then along a lane. At the very end of the lane was the towering wall of the town, shallow stone steps running up the inside. We climbed them, up and up, until we got to the ramparts and could look northward toward the horizon where England lay. England, the queen, the princess, my lord: they all seemed a long way away. It seemed to me in that moment that I had known a better life as a fool to a queen than I had being a fool to Daniel and to his stone-hearted mother and his poisonous sisters.

“Now,” he said, matching his steps to mine as we walked along the wall, seagulls crying over our heads and the waves slapping at the stones. “What is the matter, Hannah?”

I did not turn the conversation round and round like a woman would do. I went straight to the heart of it, as if I were still a troubled pageboy and not a betrayed wife. “Your mother tells me that you have got a Calais woman with child,” I said bluntly. “And that you see her and her child three times a week.”

I could feel his stride falter, and when I looked up at him he had lost the color from his cheeks. “Yes,” he said. “That’s true.”

“You should have told me.”

He nodded, marshaling his thoughts. “I suppose I should have done. But if I had told you, would you have married me and come to live with me here?”

“I don’t know. No, probably not.”

“Then you see why I did not tell you.”

“You cozened me and married me on a lie.”

“I told you that you were the one great love of my life, and you are. I told you that I thought we should marry to provide for my mother and for your father, and I still think that we did the right thing. I told you that we should marry so that we might live together, as the Children of Israel, and I could keep you safe.”

“Safe in a hovel!” I burst out.

Daniel recoiled at that: the first time that I had told him directly that I despised his little house. “I am sorry that is what you think of your home. I told you that I hope to provide better for us later.”

“You lied to me,” I said again.

“Yes,” he said simply. “I had to.”

“Do you love her?” I asked. I could hear the pitiful note in my own voice and I pulled my hand from his arm, filled with resentment that love should have brought me so low that I was whimpering at betrayal. I took a step away from him so he could not wrap me close and console me. I did not want to be a girl in love any more.

“No,” he said bluntly. “But when we first came to Calais, I was lonely and she was pretty and warm and good company. If I had any sense I would not have gone with her, but I did.”

“More than once?” I asked, wounding myself.

“More than once.”

“And I suppose you didn’t make love to her with a hand over her mouth so your mother and sisters couldn’t hear?”

“No,” he said shortly.

“And her son?”

His face warmed at once. “He is a baby of about five months old,” he said. “Strong, and lusty.”

“Does she take your name?”

“No. She keeps her own.”

“Does she live with her family?”

“She is in service.”

“They allow her to keep her child?”

“They have a kindness for her, and they are old. They like to have a child around the house.”

“They know that you are the father?”

He nodded his head.

I rocked with shock. “Everyone knows? Your sisters, the priest? Your neighbors? The people who came to our wedding feast and wished me well? Everyone?”

Daniel hesitated. “It’s a small town, Hannah. Yes, I should think everyone knows of it.” He tried to smile. “And now I should think everyone knows that you are rightly angry with me, and that I am begging your pardon. You have to get used to being part of a family, part of a town, part of the People. You are not Hannah on her own any more. You are a daughter and a wife, and one day, I hope you will be a mother.”

“Never!” I said, the word wrung out of me by my anger and my disappointment in him. “Never.”

He caught me to him and held me close. “Don’t say that,” he said. “Not even in rage with me when you would say anything to hurt me back. Not even when I deserve punishment. You know I waited for you and loved you and trusted you even when I thought you were in love with another man and might never come to me. Now you are here and we are married, and I thank God for it. And now you are here we shall make a life, however difficult it has been for us to be together. I shall be your husband and your lover and you will forgive me.”

I wrenched myself from his grip and faced him. I swear if I had had a sword I would have run him through. “No,” I said. “I will never lie with you again. You are false, Daniel, and you called on me to trust you with lies in your mouth. You are no better than any man and I thought you were. You told me that you were.”

He would have interrupted me but the words were pouring out of my mouth like a shower of stones. “And I am Hannah on my own. I don’t belong in this town, I don’t belong with the People, I don’t belong with your mother or your family and you have showed me that I don’t belong with you. I deny you, Daniel. I deny your family, and I deny your people. I will belong to no one and I will be alone.”

I turned on my heel and marched away from him, the tears running hot down my cold cheeks. I was expecting to hear him hurrying after me but he did not come. He let me go and I strode away as if I would walk home across the foam-crested gray waves to England, all the way to Robert Dudley, and tell him that I would be his mistress this very night if he desired it, since I had nothing left to lose. I had tried an honorable love and it had been nothing but lies and dishonesty: a hard road and paid with a false coin at the end.


I strode furiously along the walls until I had done a whole circuit of the town and found myself back overlooking the sea once more at the spot where we had quarreled. Daniel had gone, I had not expected to find him where I had left him. He would have gone home to his supper, and appeared to his family as composed and in control of his feelings as always. Or perhaps he would have gone to dine with his other woman, the mother of his child, as his mother had told me he did, twice a week, in the evenings, when I had stood at the window to watch for him coming and felt sorry for him, working late.