“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.

My feet, in the stupid high-heeled girls’ shoes that I now had to wear, were aching from my forced march around the town walls and I limped down the narrow stone stairs to the sally port, through the little gate to the quayside. A handful of fishing boats was making ready to set sail on the evening tide, one of the many small traders who regularly crossed the sea between France and England was loading up with goods: a cart filled with household goods for a family returning to England, barrels of wine for London vintners, baskets of late peaches, early plums, currants, great parcels of finished cloth. A woman at the quayside was parting with her mother, the woman embraced her daughter, pulling her hood up over the girl’s head, as if to keep her warm until they could be together again. The girl had to tear herself away and run up the gangplank and then she leaned over the side of the ship to kiss her hand and wave. The girl might be going into service in England, she might be leaving home to marry. I thought self-pityingly that I had not been sent out into the world with a mother’s blessing. No one had planned my wedding thinking of my preferences. My husband had been chosen by the matchmaker to make a safe home for my father and for me, and to give Daniel’s mother a grandson. But no home could be safe for us, and she already had a grandson of five months old.

I had a moment’s impulse to run to the ship’s master and ask him what he would take for my passage. If he would let me owe him the fare I could pay when I reached London. I had a desire, like a knife in the belly, to run to Robert Dudley, to return to the queen, to get back to the court where I was valued by many, and desired by my lord, and where nobody could ever betray me and shame me, where I could be the mistress of myself. I had been a fool: a servant, lower than a lady in waiting, less than a musician, on a par perhaps with a favored lap dog; but even as that I had been freer and prouder than I was, standing on the quayside with no money in my pocket, with nowhere to go but Daniel’s home, knowing that he had been unfaithful to me in the past and could be again.

It was dusk by the time I opened the door and stepped over the threshold of our house. Daniel was in the act of swinging on his cape as I came into the shop, my father waiting for him.

“Hannah!” my father exclaimed, and Daniel crossed the room in two strides and took me into his arms. I let him hold me but I looked past him to my father.

“We were coming out to look for you. You’re so late!” my father exclaimed.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think you would be worried about me.”

“Of course we were worried.” Daniel’s mother came halfway down the stairs and leaned over the rail to scold me. “A young lady can’t go running around town at dusk. You should have come home at once.”

I shot her a thoughtful look, but I said nothing.

“I am sorry,” Daniel said, his mouth close to my ear. “Let me talk with you. Don’t be distressed, Hannah.”

I glanced up at him, his dark face was scowling with anxiety.

“Are you all right?” my father asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Of course I am.”

Daniel took his cape from his shoulders. “You say, ‘of course,’” he complained. “But the town is full of the roughest of soldiers, and you are dressed as a woman now, you don’t have the protection of the queen and you don’t even know your way around.”