A Rose by Any Other Name

by Mary McMyne

Genres: Historical Fantasy; Occult & Supernatural; Fantasy Romance

Synopsis

From the author of The Book of Gothel comes the lush, magical story behind Shakespeare's sonnets, as told by one of his most famous subjects—the incendiary and mysterious Dark Lady.

My name has only been whispered, heretofore…

England, 1591. Rose Rushe’s passion for life runs deep—she loves mead and music, meddles with astrology, and laughs at her mother’s warnings to guard her reputation. When Rose’s father dies and a noble accuses her and her dear friend Cecely of witchcraft, they flee to the household of respected alchemists in London. But as their bond deepens, their sanctuary begins to feel more like a cage. To escape, they turn to the occult, secretly casting charms and selling astrological advice in the hopes of building a life together. This thriving underground business leads Rose to fair young noble Henry and playwright Will Shakespeare, and so begins a brief, tempestuous, and powerful romance—one filled with secret longings and deep betrayals. 

In this world of dazzling masques and decadent feasts, where the stars decide futures, Rose will write her own fate instead. 

Release date: July 16, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 384

Sample

No doubt it was a fault in my stars that made me what I am: a wild, unruly wench. Venus was enjoying Aries while my mother laboured to bring me forth, and Mercury was conjunct with Jupiter in Aquarius. I have always been bold, contrary. Not the sort of girl who dreams a man would woo her, wed her, and carry her off to a farmhouse to raise his children. Given the choice, in truth, I would have chosen a case of dropsy over a husband.

I do not shun all womanly pursuits. I can embroider a delicate handkerchief, make an excellent mead. I love to wear a fine gown, and I have mastered the art of being alluring. But I am also a lover of astrology and poetry, music and merriment. The sort of girl whose mother had to lock the cellar where she kept the mead, who kissed five different youths before she turned fifteen, who convinced boys to take her to plays at the innyard.

Mother scolded me harshly, claiming my fame would make me unmarriageable, but that was suitable to me. I did not wish to marry any of the youths with whom she caught me “venturing.” I saw them as they saw me: sport and little more. What else was there to do in our sleepy village?

From a young age, I dreamed of escape. I wanted to wander the bustling streets of London, watch plays in famous theatres, see the notorious houses of ill repute. I wanted to hear performances by great musicians, attend masques and decadent feasts.

To live in London, I thought I might have to find my mother’s family, Italian immigrants of whom she refused to speak. Or that I might take a position as a servant in the house of an astrologer. But the escape plan that appealed to me most, my dream, was to become a court musician.

I have always loved how music moves the spirit, awakening instincts that would otherwise lie dormant—like the lute string that vibrates when another of its consort plays its note. There were no women in my father’s music company, but women sang in the streets and performed in masques at noble houses. I didn’t see why the queen’s court need be different.

If there were no female musicians at court already, I could be first. I was blessed with a singular talent. When I sang hymns in church, other women stopped singing to stare. Father’s musician friends said my voice was like a siren’s.

As I approached marrying age, my father encouraged me to practise my music because he thought it might help me attract a husband. Mother warned me to be chaste and modest in my playing so I didn’t further damage my name. Their matchmaking attempts were going nowhere. No one wanted a woman like me for a wife, no matter how beautifully I bedecked my hair or brightened my cheeks.

Garlands and ribbons cannot repair a reputation.

I listened when Father, a spinet player, advised me on my music. I practised during every spare moment. By twenty-one, I was uncommon skilled with the virginal—my favourite instrument—and adept with the psaltery, viol, and lute. I knew I was good enough to play at court. The question was how to get there.

Near the end of August that year, when Father and his music company were in town, they heard me singing my little brother to sleep and called me downstairs to perform. I put on one of my mother’s old dresses, a rich rose-coloured damask gown from her trunk full of the fine clothes she owned from before she met Father. I checked my appearance in my mirror, coiled my hair into a net, and carried the psaltery into the garden, slipping a rose behind my ear.

It was almost twilight. The horizon looked as if it were on fire. The sky was a sea of lilac, perfectly clear. Mother’s garden glowed with a reddish golden hue. The bees whose wax she used for candles buzzed as they returned to their hives. The air was heavy with the scent of blooms.

Roses, of course, whose petals my mother used in love charms. Lavender to soothe jealousy. Dianthus, rosemary, rue. Beautiful, but they reminded me of what I wasn’t. I had no trace of the occult gifts my mother said ran in her family. I seemed to have access only to star charts and the world of the senses.

I placed the psaltery on my lap, remembering the song I’d written for my friend Cecely, inspired by our dreams of escaping to London. Father’s friends gathered around me, dressed in faded summer attire, sipping mead from cheap pewter goblets. I pretended I was playing for an audience of rank, a visiting earl or duchess. The silver tune filled the garden.

I met the men’s eyes as I played, watching their inner recalcitrance awaken. Mother frowned from the back door, her black hair pulled into a severe bun. She disapproved of me playing secular music, but I loved the way playing it made me feel—seductive, powerful.

When I finished, the men applauded, wildly appreciative of my performance. Mother rolled her eyes and went inside. Father ignored her, rewarding my efforts with a goblet of mead. I savoured the honeyed taste; it was like drinking sunlight.

The violist said my song was extraordinary, that he’d never heard anything like it. The elderly lutenist announced that a boy as skilled as I could play at court. “Though boy she clearly is not,” he said, raising a lecherous eyebrow and drawing a chuckle from all but my father.

I raised my own brow, pressing the psaltery to my chest, smiling prettily. “I’ll be sure to tell your wife you noticed.”

The lutenist went pale. Father and the others howled with laughter. I drained my goblet and bade them good night, counting the evening a success.

I had been waiting for the right moment to tell Father about my musical ambitions, and the lutenist had raised the subject for me. Normally I am blunt of speech—perhaps too blunt—but the stakes were too high to be careless about this subject. I checked my ephemeris to ensure that the stars were favourable. Mercury was still in Leo, an auspicious time for persuasion.

I waited for my father’s guests to depart, my heart tripping like a child playing hop-egg at Easter. When the last guest was gone, I found Father in the kitchen, draining the last bit of mead from the jug. He seemed to be in good spirits, his brown eyes merry behind his spectacles. “You’re still awake?”

“I had difficulty sleeping. All the excitement.”

“You distinguished yourself in both music and wit tonight.” He laughed, shaking his head. He was proud of my skill with rhetoric. “That whitebeard deserved that barb.”

I righted a goblet that lay sideways on the table. “Mother says your latest matchmaking attempt failed?”

Father set down the mead jug, puzzled at the change of subject. His cheeks were bright red, his eyes slightly crossed as they always were when he was in his cups. A smirk pulled at his lips. “You haven’t exactly made things easy, Rose.”

“Perhaps marriage isn’t as foregone a conclusion for women as it once was. A new era is dawning. There’s an unmarried woman on the throne. The queen employs female dancers, a female painter.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Do you think Underhill would ask the Master of Revels to audition me as a court musician, if you offered him a wager?”

Father blinked at me—once, twice—looking both shocked and impressed by my proposal. Our old friend Master Underhill, an alchemist with connections at court, had visited last spring with his son Richard. When he bragged about how close he’d become to the Master of Revels, I had seen an opportunity. Underhill was fond of me, and he had a terrible weakness for gambling.

Father didn’t laugh. I’ll give him that. Suddenly he looked completely sober. He drew a deep breath, closing his eyes. The moment stretched out. “Where would you live?” he asked finally.

“I could use my salary to rent a room from Underhill.”

Father opened his mouth, but I continued.

“This is highly irregular, I know. There are a dozen problems to solve if it works. But I’m good enough to play at court, Father. You know it. Let me audition, and I’ll prove myself.”

Father shook his head, the corners of his mouth turning downward in an indulgent smirk. “What am I to do with you?”

Master Underhill visited with his son Richard the next week on their way back from Bohemia. I waited until my mother had gone upstairs to bring up my idea. Underhill was always in better spirits when she wasn’t around. He was in particularly good spirits this trip, chattering about a breakthrough in his alchemical experiments as soon as he hung his tall hat at the door. He was so excited, his hands shook, and his fingertips were still stained red with cinnabar.

He listened with interest as I proposed the wager my father suggested: If I was hired, Underhill would rent me a room. If I wasn’t, Father would give Underhill his astrologer’s ring, which he admired each time he visited. I had been surprised when Father offered to gamble the ring. Father had always said it was lucky, the reason he was so good at casting horoscopes. But Underhill was fascinated with the ring, and Father told me: It isn’t much of a risk, Rose. I believe in you.

Underhill looked at my father, his kind green eyes wide with surprise. His gaze fell, eager, upon the ring, which glinted in the candlelight. Underhill set down his goblet and pushed back his silvery hair. “The Master of Revels will think you a novelty,” he said finally, his eyes crinkling with amusement.

A rush of affection for him filled me. “I owe you a debt.”

He shook his head. “This will be my pleasure.”

That night, while I was beating his son Richard mercilessly at our favourite card game, triumph, I asked him to tell me what it would be like to live in London. Richard, never shy about talking, was happy to oblige. He told me about the Queen Elizabeth’s Day festivities that took place each November—the elaborate musical performances that would echo through the tiltyards, the massive horned effigy of the pope that the Basketweavers would burn—his eyes gleaming with a Protestant sense of reprisal. Perhaps my audition would coincide with the holiday.

He told me about Underhill House. Although the Underhills came to visit us twice a year or so, I’d never been to their home. It was three stories, he said, finely arrayed with rich furnishings. They had a great library with shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling, hundreds of books on astrology and alchemy, over two dozen servants, a talented cook. I ached to live in a place like that, where the chairs didn’t have wobbly legs and the tapestries on the walls weren’t a hundred years out of fashion. I would be able to see plays, attend balls and feasts, spend my days playing music.

The only part of my plan I had left to reason out was how to take Cecely with me.

Unfortunately, by the time Underhill wrote back with good news, my father had fallen ill. We thought it was an ague at first, but my mother’s most potent healing charm did nothing, and the smelling herbs the physician prescribed only made his cough worse.

As the weeks passed, I tried to tell myself that Father was getting older, that his healing would simply take more time. But Mother cast her healing charm so many times she became weak, and Father only grew sicker.

The week before we were supposed to go to London, Mother bought a nostrum from Cecely’s parents, mountebanks who had just returned from one of their medicine-selling tours. Their remedies were supposed to be of dubious quality, but nothing else was working.

When Mother offered Father the red nostrum, he made a jest about whether she was trying to kill him or cure him. Mother reminded him of the brevity of the lifeline on his right palm. “It’s the only thing we haven’t tried, Secundus,” she said, her expression mirthless. “This illness could be what kills you.”

A few nights later, Father called me to his room. It was late. The moon was new. The chamber was dark except for the small circle of light my candle cast.

As I approached the bed, I noticed my father’s laboured breathing. His black sheepdog, Hughe, lay on the floor beside him, his muzzle pressed to the ground, his eyes mournful.

Something knitted my stomach. Fear, perhaps, or dread.

“Rose?” my father said in a gravelly voice. “Is that you?”

I closed my eyes, struggling to master the tightness in my chest. Tranquilla sum, I thought. Tranquilla ero. I have always found Latin soothing.

I drew the bedcurtains, holding out my candle so I could see my father. His brown eyes, enlarged by his spectacles, wandered up to meet mine. He was only forty, but his hair, once as red as the queen’s, had gone white. He’d lost two or three stone in as many months.

“I’ll be plain.” He sighed, shaking his head. His eyes were shadowed. “My death will leave your mother and brother vulnerable. We must reconsider our plans for your future.”

My heart dropped. His death? Will leave, future tense, as if he were certain. “Don’t speak that way, Father. You get an ague each summer. You’re frightening me.”

His gaze was steady. This is not an ague, his eyes said, and you know it.

“Mother’s predictions don’t always come true. Palm reading is notoriously unreliable—”

He sighed. “I know my body, Rose. It’s failing.”

A cold sensation travelled through my chest as I allowed myself to consider for the first time what my life would be like without him: the chill of a house ruled by my mother.

“Your uncle Primus is going to try to take back the farm. If you marry, we can arrange for your husband to take in your mother and brother.”

Marry? The word called up a sorry image of myself in my nightgown, wild hair frizzing from a braid, a babe nursing at my breast. A much older man in bed behind me, moustached, a widower who wouldn’t be bothered by my reputation. The image fought with the future self I’d imagined in London—performing at a royal feast dressed in finery, hair carefully arranged. My chest went tight.

“Why wouldn’t Uncle Primus let Mother stay here? Aunt Margery stayed in Uncle Tertius’s house after he died. They’re still there, all these years later.”

“Your uncle plays favourites.” Father turned his astrologer’s ring anxiously, his eyes sad. “Perhaps your husband will let you sing with the choir here.”

My throat constricted. Half the local choir’s members couldn’t carry a tune. “With my reputation, I would be lucky if my husband let me out of his sight.”

Father laughed, but it quickly devolved into coughing. “I cannot change the past, Rose. Or set the future.”

He removed his ring—an easy feat, it had grown loose—and held it out. “Keep this safe. Don’t let your mother have it, no matter how hard things get. It’s too valuable. You know how she is. I want you and Edmund to have something to remember me by.”

I stared at the ring, uneasy. Under ordinary circumstances, I would’ve jumped to take it. But now, I felt as if accepting the ring would mean accepting what he was saying.

“Go on,” he prodded. “Take it.”

The ring was heavier than it looked. The candlelight was too dim to read the outer ring’s inscription, but I knew it by heart: SUPERIORA DE INFERIORIBUS, INFERIORA DE SUPERIORIBUS. Father said it referred to the connection between the heavens and the world below. The ring was of excellent artisanship. Stacked beneath the outer band were several concealed inner hoops that fanned out into a miniature model of the heavens.

I rubbed my finger along the cold metal, feeling the grooves of the inscription, unsettled. “Couldn’t Mother take Edmund to live with her family?”

“Your mother’s family—” Father said. He opened his mouth as if he were going to say more, then shook his head. “That’s not an option. I’ll speak to my brother.”

“Why must he be involved?”

“Don’t be obtuse, Rose. Where else would we get the dowry?” My father’s voice was resigned. “Go to the Queen Elizabeth’s Day festivities in town tomorrow. Bless the Protestant martyrs. This will be easier if you make it clear where your loyalties lie.”

He waited for me to signal agreement. Yes, Father. With all my heart. Even so. But he was so sure of himself, and I was so sure he was wrong.

I wanted to throw the ring at him.

The next day, I went to the Queen Elizabeth’s Day festivities with no intent to bless the martyrs. I stopped at Cecely’s house to ask her to come with me, thinking her grandmother might’ve heard something to help me prove my father wrong.

Mother had forbidden me to see Cecely because she was “common,” but I’ve never been particularly concerned with her edicts. Cecely and I had become close three years ago when her parents stopped taking her on medicine-selling tours and sent her to live with her grandmother.

Apart from my father and Edmund, she was my favourite person. A Libra sun, charming and airy, and a Taurus moon with a taste for fine things, unfortunate given her family’s poverty. But her Mercury was in Gemini, so she was singular clever. She had a wicked sense of humour.

Her grandmother lived in a tiny ramshackle cottage with barely enough room for the two of them. The straw roof was in need of repair. Three trees clustered around the house: A hawthorn, whose haws made a syrup that went into her father’s nostrums. A blackthorn, whose berries were always too sour, but which her grandmother wouldn’t cut down for fear of bad luck. And a service-tree, which they had planted beside the house to protect its inhabitants.

The hawthorn was skeletal now, having been picked clean of its red haws a few weeks before. The blackthorn berries glowed bright blue, covered in a thin layer of frost. The service-tree shivered as I approached, as if it were trying to decide if I was a threat. Cecely always nodded at it. She said if you acknowledged the tree’s presence, the shivering stopped. Her grandmother answered my knock.

Cecely called down that she would accompany me to the festivities but needed to change first. When she came out, she was wearing the scarlet brocade bodice with the low, square collar I had outgrown and given her a few weeks before. The scarlet fabric brought out the russet in her golden hair; the plunging neckline accentuated the milky curve of her neck. She had brightened her cheeks with fucus, coloured her lips to match her bodice, and pinned her coppery hair back into a golden net. She was breaking the sumptuary laws in at least three ways for her family’s income, but she was grievous beautiful.

It gave me a thrill to see her in my clothes.

“You look splendid,” I breathed, then worried my enthusiasm would make her uncomfortable. Her beauty was a theme to which my thoughts returned too often.

“I try,” she said with a coy smile. She tugged on her bodice, straightening the way it sat on her hips, then smoothed its fabric over her chest. “There. It suits me, doesn’t it?”

“Very well.”

Cecely had become an expert on costuming herself from performing in her father’s street show. Her mother played the fiddle, and she danced. I had been envious of their freedom to perform in public until Cecely confided how difficult their travels were. She said the reason she stopped touring with her parents was that they were run out of Southwark.

I started to tell her what my father had told me as we set off, but I couldn’t bring myself to mention it. She was as invested in our dream of moving to London as I was, although she had always been more sceptical of our chances.

“Have you heard anything about the Rushes?” I made myself ask.

She looked at me, her eyes watchful, just this side of suspicious. “Why?”

“My father thinks they’ll try to take back the farm. If he dies, he wants me to—” My throat felt suddenly dry. “He thinks—”

“What?”

I knew I had to tell her. “He wants me to marry to protect Mother and Edmund.”

She searched my face, her black eyes large. Her sigh deflated me utterly. When she spoke next, her voice was hard. “I’ll ask my grandmother if she’s heard anything.”

I made myself meet her gaze, ready to say more, but she shook her head, an unspoken entreaty to lay the subject to rest.

Feeling defeated, I turned my attention to the square, where the Basketweavers were preparing to burn a small straw simulacrum of the pope. Several of the men stopped working to gawk at Cecely, who rolled her eyes, accustomed to the attention. At the sight of the tiny trio of town musicians setting up on the rickety stage, I felt a wave of bitterness. How I longed to hear the grand musical production Richard had said would take place in London.

I rarely pray, but the urge struck me then, the prayer so self-seeking it bordered on blasphemy. The words rushed from my mind before I thought better. Lord, please let Father recover so we can still go to London, please and thank you. Immediately feeling guilty, I raised my eyes to the heavens and begged forgiveness.

When the musicians began their warm-ups, Cecely and I exchanged a pained glance. The fiddler hadn’t fully tuned his instrument; every time he slid the bow over the bottom string, the note was slightly false. As we neared the platform, he noticed the out-of-tune string and fixed it.

Finally, Cecely mouthed.

I stopped beside her, watching her with faint anticipation. Sometimes when we stumbled across street musicians, Cecely moved in a mesmerising way—closing her eyes and doing a subtle version of the brawle—as if she were remembering her part in her parents’ show. I loved watching her.

The noise on the platform stilled, and the musicians looked at one another, ready to start. The fiddler counted, and the three of them leapt into motion at once. As they conjured a bright and dizzy tune, Cecely began her subtle dance, touching my arm to try to entice me to dance with her. I shook my head. “Cecely,” I protested, laughing. “You know I cannot dance.”

She grinned. Her skirt shivered around her hips, and the coins in the pocket she kept hidden in her petticoats jingled. The bodice truly did suit her.

“Hot codlings!” a passing peddler called.

“Ripe chestnuts, ripe!” shouted another.

“Hip, hip,” someone cheered. “God bless the queen!”

Then we heard it, in the distance. My little brother’s tiny voice above the din. “Rose!” he was shouting. “Rose!” Edmund was snaking his way through the square toward us, his little brown flat cap bobbing up and down as the crowd parted.

I felt a familiar rush of affection at the sight of him. His freckled face, the rounded cheeks that made him look younger than his five years. Then I saw the fear in his eyes, and my stomach dropped. I bent and held out my arms, knowing what he would say before he spoke.

“It’s Father—” he sobbed in a small high voice, pressing his face against my chest. “He’s dead—”

It took every ounce of my restraint not to break into sobs right then, but I swallowed my feelings and hugged him until his chest stopped heaving. Then I looked him in the eye. “Good now,” I told him. “Let’s get you back home.”

He climbed up into my arms and the three of us rushed out of town.

The road home seemed traitorously pretty; the leaves were turning on all the trees. Madder-red and marmalade-orange, they fell, hither and thither, going about the business of autumn as if nothing was wrong. My thoughts scattered like a flock of rooks. Flapping about, filling my head with a noisome dread. This had happened so fast.

Once home and upstairs, we found my mother sitting beside my father in bed. The bedcurtains drawn, his body still. From where I stood, he could have been asleep. Hughe lay at the foot of the bed, shoulders slumped, his sad eyes fixed on my father’s body.

Cecely curtsied to my mother, lowering her eyes. “Madam Katarina.”

Mother looked up, frowning when she saw who had spoken. She met my gaze, ignoring my friend’s greeting. “Dio lo riposi,” she said to me, betraying her feelings only with the Italian she used when she was upset. She was never one to make a show of emotion.

I hung back, struck with the thought that entering the room would make this real.

Edmund stared at our father’s body, his breath starting to hitch. Mother scooped him up, her thick black braid swinging behind her back. “Shhh. We must be glad, Edmund. Your father is with God.”

She met my eyes. “He started coughing up blood and couldn’t stop.”

I moved past them. On the bed, my father’s eyes were closed. His expression was oddly composed, the sort of expression a man wears to trial or the gallows. Hughe whimpered.

“The soul lingers,” Mother said, crossing herself. She carried my brother to the doorway. “Why don’t you bid him farewell?”

As she stepped into the hall to give me privacy, Cecely leaned in and touched my hand. “I’m so sorry, Rose,” she whispered, her voice choked, meeting my eyes. The sympathy in her expression was almost too much for me to bear.

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. She squeezed my hand and followed my mother out.

Turning to my father on the bed, I found myself doubting the accuracy of my mother’s statement. I sensed no spirit, no ghost. Nothing but my own sadness. I swallowed the sob that was rising in my throat, making myself take his hand, trying to summon the necessary self-control to tell him goodbye. A moment passed, two.

I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

The floor creaked, interrupting my thoughts. Behind me, Edmund stood, sucking his thumb. His resemblance to my father struck me: his big brown eyes, his coppery hair. Both he and the first Edmund, who’d died seven years earlier, were like tiny copies of my father.

“I sent Cecely home.” Mother’s voice was tight. I could feel her disapproval. “She said she’d tell the Rushes and fetch the parson.”

My grandmother and Uncle Primus came by later that afternoon, but they didn’t offer their condolences. It was as if they didn’t see Mother holding the door open, as if she didn’t exist. In my father’s chamber, my grandmother went to the bed first, approaching his body with a distraught expression. My uncle showed no emotion, preoccupied with something he saw on my father’s dressing table.

I peered over his shoulder to see what it was. My mother’s spell book, open to the healing spell she’d been trying to use to cure Father. I froze. In her shock over his death, Mother had forgotten to put it up. Two circles darkened the top of the page, her code for fortnight spells that worked best when the moon was waxing. The incantation was the usual jumble of Latin and nonsense, a harmless prayer to banish sickness—except for the invocation, which was addressed to a decidedly un-Protestant subject, Regina Caeli, the “queen of heaven”:



For ague

Ring a candle with blossoms of herb of the fourth star, one cluster each night until the moon is full. Speak this following prayer by candlelight while laying hands:

O Regina Caeli, roudos—

fugite, mali

fugite, febres.

Fiat fiat

Reading it, Uncle Primus blinked, once, twice. “Mother,” he said, gesturing for my grandmother to look. The two of them exchanged a glance.

Without another word, Uncle Primus tore out the page and started downstairs. My grandmother looked at the bed one last time and followed him out.

“Primus!” my mother called in a plaintive voice, but the only answer was the front door slamming behind them.

After the funeral, everyone followed us home. Everyone except the Rushes, that is, whose failure to turn down our lane raised more than a few eyebrows. When Aunt Margery’s carriage passed us, following the rest of the family toward their homes, she mouthed an apology. My mother paled with fury. She had watched Aunt Margery’s babies while Uncle Tertius was sick.

The Underhills were already waiting outside our farmhouse when we arrived, having come in their coach. They stood at the door, their London finery far surpassing that of the other funeralgoers. Richard’s black hair shone as it always did, no matter how far he had travelled. He wore a black brocade doublet with velvet sleeves and Venetian breeches.

Master Underhill was similarly caparisoned, though he looked deeply unwell. There were dark circles under his kind eyes, and his expression was devastated.

As I let them in, my mother hurried to put out funeral cakes and ale.

Edmund, maddened by all the excitement, began running circles through the parlour like a hen with her head cut off. He was being a terror, but I was too exhausted to correct him—that is, until he knocked Master Underhill over as the old man hung his tall hat beside the door.

“Edmund! Look where you’re going!”

My brother looked up at me, his eyes wide. So startled, I flinched, wishing I hadn’t raised my voice.

When he saw my expression, he fell into a fit of the knavish laughter that is so regrettably common in five-year-old boys.

“Are you hurt?” I asked Underhill.

Our friend shook his head, a thin smile beneath his silver beard.

“Forgive him. He’s as wild as a woodland creature, or perhaps an imp.”

“As it should be,” he said, holding up a hand. “For a boy his age.”

“Mistress Rose,” Richard said, his green eyes soft.

We moved aside, so the other guests who were now arriving could come in. “Master Richard.”

“How are you?”

I knew he spoke in kindness, but his question irritated me regardless. How do you expect me to be? I wanted to reply. Most terrible. Fouler than foul. Father is dead, and his last wish was for me to marry. But Mother was watching from the corner. From her raised eyebrows and strained expression, I could te