Tombland

He shrugged. ‘Glad to be shot of them all. Anyway, Tamasin doesn’t know I’m not with them. I’ll stay with you the rest of the week. You can’t go back to London yet, can you?’

‘Jack’s sharing my room here,’ Nicholas said. ‘I’ve spoken to the innkeeper. And the doctor spoke to him, too. He’s agreed to Josephine visiting – so long as there’s a chaperone, and she comes by the servants’ entrance. I made free with your purse, I’m afraid.’

I waved a hand gingerly. ‘You have done very well.’

‘Fortunately, the innkeeper is among those who think you a hero for saving a gentleman from the gallows.’

I smiled ruefully. ‘Not all think so, Dr Belys says.’

‘It’ll be a nine days’ wonder, you’ll see,’ Barak said.

Nicholas looked at me. ‘The twins left with their friends when their father was cut down. That pair are –’ He shook his head, lost for words.

‘What of Isabella? Is she safe?’

‘She’s just gone back to Brikewell with Chawry, I saw them off this morning. She will be returning to visit her husband.’

I thought, She’s gone to get rid of the horse, and to get the gold hidden in the stable. If it is still there. I leaned back with a sigh.

Barak rose. ‘I’ll fetch Josephine back in, shall I?’ he said diffidently. ‘To attend your back?’

* * *

FOR TWO DAYS I stayed in bed, spending much time looking through the window at the tree and the church outside, too tired to think much due to the medicine Belys had given me to ease the pain. The weather had cooled, there was cloud and a little rain spattered on the diamond-paned windows.

At first it felt shaming to have Barak and Josephine carefully turn me over in bed, then have my nightshirt raised so that Josephine could rub in the ointment Belys had given her, richly scented with lavender. Her hands, though calloused from hard work, were gentle and dextrous. She told me her father had sometimes got her to massage his back, and Edward, too, if he had had a hard day moving stones. She said she had spoken to Edward about returning to London, and he was considering it. I asked whether her husband was happy with her doing this service for me and she replied he was; he trusted her absolutely. Most times she brought Mousy with her.

Lying there, I remembered the evening I had overheard Edward, with Vowell and the stranger called Miles, talking of a rising at Attleborough, which had indeed happened, and of further action to come. Barak told me that the Attleborough landowner, an enclosing farmer named Green, had not dared reinstate his fences and had moved his sheep away. The order for the enclosure commissioners to begin their circuits of the countryside would soon be issued, he told me, while Josephine was working on my back.

‘They are needed,’ Josephine said. ‘Edward is right, the poor commons suffer greatly, this is not the godly Commonwealth it should be. Perhaps when the commissioners come, justice will be done, in the countryside at least.’ The Josephine I had known would never have ventured an opinion, let alone a radical one, so forcefully. I wondered if her husband’s opinions had become hers – or whether both had been changed by poverty.

Nicholas, who had never seen my bare back, tactfully stayed away from these sessions. I asked him to try and discover what he could about the apprentice Walter. I had given Toby the task, but did not expect him still to be in Norwich. I also dictated a statement to Nicholas, which I signed for him to lodge with the court, stating that the twins had threatened Scambler outside the court. I had a copy sent to their grandfather. That, I hoped, would make them leave the boy alone.

I asked Josephine more about what she remembered of Grace Bone and her siblings from the time she had lived near them. All three, she said, were well liked. Peter was known as a skilled man and a fair employer. While both sisters were jolly, bawdy girls, Peter was more serious, a reader and a Commonwealth man. Grace and Mercy had been in their thirties, and Josephine had wondered why neither had married. Perhaps their loudness and confidence put suitors off.

* * *

BY WEDNESDAY , I was starting to walk with a stick, Barak and Nicholas at my side. I still had to move carefully to avoid spasms, but I could feel that my back was more relaxed. By Thursday, again with Nicholas or Barak to hand, I was shuffling around the room and managed carefully to straighten my back.

The next day, Nicholas came to my room bearing three letters. Two bore the seal of the Lady Elizabeth; the third was in Guy’s writing.

‘Those answers have come quick, within the week,’ I said.

‘There was one for Jack, too, from Tamasin, I think, and I have one from Beatrice. And I have a message from Isabella Boleyn; she would like to come and see you tomorrow morning. She is visiting her husband at the castle.’

‘Good.’ I smiled. ‘By the way, I thought I might go outside later today. I feel – looser. I will take my stick, and you can accompany me. Just out to the street and back.’

Nicholas looked dubious.