For, after all, there was a man to whom I'd given my affection, and he was a fine man of good family, who had risen now so high at court that he could give his wife a life of ease there, if he chose to marry.
As though he had read my thoughts, my father asked, "Have you seen Valentine this morning?"
"No, I've had no reason to."
My aunt piped in, "Besides, 'tis barely six o'clock, he will be sleeping, surely."
"Not this morning," said my father. "He has business at court also, and he promised I may ride there with him in his coach. Phoebe, would you go across and tell him, please, that I am nearly ready?"
I suspected that my father, in reply to my remark that I'd no reason to see Valentine, was trying now to give me one. I smiled. "Of course."
I might have wished my hair was not arranged so plainly, nor that I had laced my stays so loosely underneath my long-sleeved bodice in a style two seasons out of fashion. But I could at least draw comfort from the knowledge that my fray with Logan would have brought some color to my cheeks.
"You're very pretty when you're angry," Valentine had teased me once.
To his credit, he rarely made me angry.
We'd grown up together, here in St. Bartholomew's, within this close community that sat outside the city walls of London, on what once had been the grounds of an old monastery. Nearly fifty years before my birth, when Great King Henry broke with Rome and founded our own Protestant religion here in England, he declared an end to nunneries and monasteries, claimed those buildings for the crown, and gave or sold them into private hands. Thus St. Bartholomew's had been transformed.
The church itself remained—its bells still tolled the quarters of our waking hours—but the buildings that the monks had used were fashioned into mansions, and new houses had been built within the walls of the great inner courtyard that we called the Close, with yet more houses built upon the field where every August's end the fair of St. Bartholomew brought people thronging, as they had time out of mind, to sell their wares and see the spectacle.
It was a fine address to have. When we'd first come to live here I had scarce believed our fortune. Even then, though I'd been small, the Close had seemed a sanctuary, beautiful and privileged, where several of our neighbors, like my father, worked at court, while others had no need to work at all by virtue of their birth and status.
Valentine's father was such a man. His family owned estates in Wiltshire but he rarely saw them, having argued with his brothers as a younger man and hardened as he aged so he continued unforgiving. That always made me sad, for could I have had my brothers back again I'd not have wasted any moments left to us in arguing, so glad would I have been to have their company.
But Valentine's father never changed his course, once set. There was an order to his life, and to his days. I knew at this hour he would be outdoors patrolling in his gardens, as a military leader might inspect the boundaries of his headquarters.
His mansion was well situated for this purpose, being in what had been designed to be the frater—or great dining hall—for the use of the long-departed monks. A long building of grand proportions, it shielded the church behind it and butted up at right angles to the equally impressive former dormitory, which had also been converted to a mansion of great beauty that formed the far angle at this north end of the Close.
To the other side of the Foxes' mansion, and a stone's throw to the south of it, as though aware it ought to keep itself below its betters and not seek to share their level, lay our own house, less impressive. Yet the bricks still had a solid look and all the shutters had been newly painted and the window glass was catching the new rays of rising sunlight, and as always when I stepped into the Close, I felt a sense of pride.
"Up early," Valentine's father said as I came across the green to greet him, which I judged the closest he had come in weeks to giving me a compliment.
I often marveled he could be so like his son to look at, and yet so completely unlike him in character.
