After that I would not come downstairs at the same time as Daniel. I felt scorched by the bright glances of his sisters which flicked from his face to mine and back again, as if to read how we had been transformed into man and wife by the muffled exchanges of the night. I would either get up before the others, and be downstairs with the kindling laid on last night’s embers, boiling the breakfast gruel before anyone else was up, or I would wait until he had eaten his breakfast and gone.

When I came down late, his sisters would nudge each other and whisper.

“I see you keep court hours still,” Mary said spitefully.

Her mother made a gesture with her hand to silence her. “Leave her alone, she will need to rest,” she said.

I shot a quick glance at her, it was the first time she had defended me against Mary’s acid tongue, and then I saw it was not me, Hannah, that she was defending. It was not even Daniel’s wife – as though anything that belonged to Daniel was illuminated by the glow he cast in this household – it was because she hoped I was breeding. She wanted another boy, another boy for the House of Israel, another little d’Israeli to continue the line. And if I could produce him soon, while she was still young and active, she could bring him up as her own, in her own house, under her supervision and then it would be: “my son’s little boy, my son the doctor, you know.”

If I had not served for three years at court I would have fought like a cat with my mother-in-law and my three dear sisters-in-law; but I had seen worse and heard worse and endured worse than they could ever have dreamed. I knew that the moment I complained to Daniel about them I would bring down on my own head all his worry and all his love for them, for me, and for the family he was trying to make.

He was too young a man to take the responsibility of keeping a family safe in such difficult and dangerous times. He was studying his skill as a physician, every day he had to advise men and women who were staring death in the face. He did not want to come home at night to a coven of women torn apart by malice and envy.

So I held my tongue and when his sisters were witty at my expense, or even openly critical of the bread I had bought at market, of my wasteful kitchen practices, of the printers’ ink on my hands, of my books on the kitchen table, I said nothing. I had been at court and seen the ladies in waiting vying for the attention of the queen. I knew all about female malice, I had just never thought that I would have to live with it at home.

My father saw some of it and tried to protect me. He found me translation work to do, and I would sit at the bookshop counter and work from Latin to English or from English to French while the smell of the ink from the press drifted in reassuringly from the yard outside. Sometimes I helped him to print, but the complaints from Mrs. Carpenter if I got ink on my apron or, worse, on my gown, were so extreme that both my father and I tried to avoid arousing her indignation.

As the summer wore on and Daniel’s mother gave me the pick of the food, the breast of the scrawny French chickens, the fattest sweetest peaches, I realized that she was waiting for me to speak to her. In the last days of August she could not bear to wait any longer.

“Have you got something to tell me, daughter?” she asked.

I felt myself stiffen. I always flinched when she called me “daughter.” I never wanted another mother but the one who bore me. In truth, I thought it an impertinence of this unlovable woman to try to claim me for her own. I was my mother’s child and not hers, and if I had wanted any other mother then I would have chosen the queen who had laid my head in her lap, and stroked my curls and told me that she trusted me.

Besides, I knew Daniel’s mother now. I had not observed her for the whole of the summer without learning her particular route to things. If she called me “daughter” or praised how I had combed my hair under my cap she was after something: information, a promise, some kind of intimacy. I looked at her without a glimmer of a smile, and waited.

“Something to tell me?” she prompted. “A little news that would make an old woman very, very happy?”

I realized what she was after. “No,” I said shortly.

“Not yet sure?”

“Sure I am not with child, if that is what you mean,” I said flatly. “I had my course two weeks ago. Did you want to know anything more?”

She was so intent on what I was saying that she ignored my rudeness. “Well, what is the matter with you?” she demanded. “Daniel has had you at least twice a week ever since your wedding day. No one can doubt him. Are you ill?”

“No,” I said through cold lips. She would, of course, know exactly how often we made love. She had listened without any sense of shame, she would go on listening. It would not even occur to her that I could take no pleasure in his touch or his kiss knowing that she was just the other side of the thinnest of walls, ears pricked. She would not have dreamed that I had hoped for pleasure. As far as she was concerned the matter was for Daniel’s pleasure and for the making of a grandson for her.

“Then what is the matter?” she repeated. “I have been waiting for you to tell me that you are with child any day these last two months.”

“Then sorry I am, to so disappoint you,” I said, as cold as Princess Elizabeth in one of her haughty moods.

In a sudden movement she snatched my wrist, and twisted it round so that I was forced to turn and face her, her grip biting into the skin. “You’re not taking something?” she hissed. “You’ve not got some draught to take to stop a child coming? From your clever friends at court? Some slut’s trick?”

“Of course not!” I said, roused to anger. “Why would I?”

“God knows what you would or would not do!” she exclaimed in genuine distress, flinging me from her. “Why would you go to court? Why would you not come with us to Calais? Why be so unnatural, so unwomanly, more like a boy than a girl? Why come now, too late, when Daniel could have had his pick of any girl in Calais? Why come at all if you’re not going to breed?”

I was stunned by her anger, it knocked the words out of me. For a moment I said nothing. Then slowly I found the words. “I was begged for a fool, it was not my choice,” I said. “You should reproach my father if you dare with that, not me. I wore boy’s clothes to protect me, as you well know. And I did not come with you because I had sworn to the Princess Elizabeth that I would be with her at her time of trial. Most women would think that showed a true heart, not a false one. And I came now because Daniel wanted me, and I wanted him. And I don’t believe a word you say. He could not have the pick of the girls of Calais.”

“He could indeed!” she said, bridling. “Pretty girls and fertile girls too. Girls who would come with a dowry and not in breeches, a girl who has a baby in the cradle this summer and knows her place, and would be glad enough to be in my house, and proud to call me mother.”

I felt very cold, like fear, like a dreadful uncertainty. “I thought you were talking in general,” I said. “D’you mean that there is a particular girl who likes Daniel?”

Mrs. Carpenter would never tell the whole truth about anything. She turned away from me and went to the breakfast pot hanging beside the fireplace and took it off the hook as if she would go out with it and scour it again. “D’you call this clean?” she demanded crossly.

“Daniel has a woman he likes, here in Calais?” I asked.

“He never offered her marriage,” she said grudgingly. “He always said that you and he were betrothed and that he was promised.”

“Is she Jew, or Gentile?” I whispered.

“Gentile,” she said. “But she would take our religion if Daniel married her.”

“Married her?” I exclaimed. “But you just said he always said he was betrothed to me!”