The old lady reached out her hands. “Oh, no, my dear, they’re all wrong, as usual. I’m quite well: just dying.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. But I want to go here, at the fireside, warm. I’ve lived in this house for more than eighty years, you know.”

“Have you?” Alinor asked gently. She could see that the old woman had no fever: her face was pale, her hands cool. But her breathing was labored, with a little catch in every pant.

“Or longer. They have no idea.”

“Course they don’t,” Alinor whispered. “I remember coming here with my mother to see you when I was just a little girl.”

“And your grandmother. She brought you when I broke my leg falling from the apple tree. Three generations of wisewomen in your family, and faerie blood, no doubt. Does your daughter have the sight?”

“We don’t speak of it now, in these days.”

A grimace showed what the old lady thought of the mealy-mouthed generation. “Faerie crafts are a great thing to have in the family. But these days—well, nothing’s allowed, is it?”

“The minister must guide us,” Alinor said tactfully.

The old lady shrugged irritably. “What does he know?” she asked. “It’s not as if he’s a proper priest. He doesn’t even read the Mass.”

“Hush, Grandmother.” Alinor gave her the courtesy title for an old woman. “You know, he’s the minister appointed to guide us. And the rest of it is against the law now.”

“I think I can say what I like with my last breath.”

“Does your breath hurt you?” Alinor asked.

“I’ve had something pressing on my belly for years,” the old woman said. “It’s been squeezing the life out of me.”

“Why didn’t you send for me before?”

“What could you have done, my dear?”

Alinor nodded. If the woman had a growth in her belly then nothing could be done. A physician might dare to cut a brave man or woman for a gallstone, a barber surgeon might cut a tongue tie, or slice the gum to pull out a rotting tooth. Alinor herself had once cut a live baby from the belly of a dead woman; but a growth deep in the belly of a living patient was untouchable.

“I could’ve given you something for the pain.”

“I take a little brandy,” the old lady said with simple dignity. “And then sometimes I take a little of the Scots usquebaugh. And sometimes—on bad days—I take them both together.”

Alinor smiled at her. “Would you like some herbs to ease the pain now?”

“I’ll take a little brandy,” she agreed. “In hot water. With your herbs. And you can ask the girl—what’s her name?—if the minister comes out these days, and if there are prayers for the dying, for I think I’m ready.”

“I’ll ask Mrs. Hebden, your daughter-in-law,” Alinor reminded her.

“Yes, that’s her.” The old lady nodded. “Ask her what the minister does for the dying, if he does anything these days? Or if that’s all changed as well?”

Alinor rose to her feet and found that William Hebden was hovering at the scullery door. “She wants some brandy in hot water,” she said.

“We’ve got a little keg of brandy,” he said. “It was a gift. Not bought.”

Alinor understood at once that it was contraband: smuggled brandy. “No matter to me,” she reassured him. “And she wants to know if the minister will come to say the prayers for the dying?”

“Not to the likes of us,” he said shortly. “We’re not grand enough for him. We don’t pay enough in tithes for him to come out to us. The chaplain at the Priory, that Mr. Summer, he’d have come for asking. He came out for free, came twice.”

Alinor flushed scarlet at his name. “Did he?” she asked. She thought that anyone would be able to hear the love in her voice. “Did he go to people for free?”

“He came and prayed with her.” William shifted his feet. “Old prayers,” he said. “Those that she likes. Probably not allowed now. But she was that ill . . .”

“Anyway, Mr. Summer has gone away,” Alinor said.

“Aye. But he left his Prayer Book here. He said she could hold it in her hand if there was no one that could read them. He said to keep it hidden, but she could hold it if it comforted her.”

“Did he?” She was swept by a longing to see anything that had belonged to James.

“He said anyone could read the prayers to her. You’re a midwife, you could say them, couldn’t you? It would be as good as a minister?”

“I can say them,” Alinor offered. “I could read them from his book. It wouldn’t be as good as him, but it’s his prayers.”

She went back to the fireside with some brandy in an earthenware cup, added a tincture of fennel, and topped it up with hot water from the pot that stood on a trivet by the fire.

Greedily, the old lady took it into her hands, wrapping her cold fingers around the cup. “Now,” she said. “Now I’m ready.”

Alinor took up James’s missal and started to spell out the beautiful old words in Latin, not knowing what they meant; but hearing the music of the sounds, knowing that he would have known them by heart, knowing that this was his faith and his God, believing that his child in her belly could perhaps hear them and feeling closer to him now, reading the office for the dying to an old lady, than she had been in all the long weeks that he had been away.

LONDON, DECEMBER 1648

James, not knowing that his prayers were being whispered by the woman he loved, went quietly through the darkened streets of the city of London, keeping to the center of the street, picking his way through the frozen muck and rubbish rather than risk walking close to the dark doorways and shadows. He turned into a grand gateway and nodded to the silent watchman, and then went down the side of the house where a single lantern was hung on a bent nail outside a narrow door.

The door opened easily when he turned the ring of the handle, and he stepped into a stone-flagged corridor, which led to the kitchen one way and to the great hall of the house the other. Before him was a small storeroom with a lighted candle on the table. James went in and seated himself at the scrubbed table.

“You’re John Makepeace?” The man came in so quietly that James had not heard his footfall.

“Yes.”

“Password?”

“Godspeed.”

“God Will Not Fail Us,” the man replied. “Have you come from the queen?”

“Yes. I have this.” James passed a thick letter.

The man broke the seal. “It’s in code,” he said irritably. “D’you know what it says?”

“Yes, I was ordered to memorize it in case I had to destroy it. It instructs you to reach the king and get him to Deptford. There’s a ship waiting for him, a coastal trader, that will take him to France. She’s called the Dilly. If you tell me when it will be, I can send a message to His Highness’s fleet and see that you are met by them, to give you safe passage on the seas.”

“And the two royal children?”

“I have no instructions for them.”