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like someone with the sweating sickness. If only I had the sweat, which left its victims delusional and babbling, dead within hours. I would prefer anything to the image engraved behind my eyelids, the image of that poor woman, contorted by pain and humiliation. The sound of the man’s voice vibrated beneath my temples.
    I sat back and wrapped my arms around my knees to stop the quaking. The moisture from the earth soaked through my skirts, and the night air cooled around me. I should have flown at the men in a rage, frightening them off like a harpy. I should have picked the woman up off the ground, tended her bruises. Offered her bread and wine in the duchess’s kitchen. I should have stopped them.
    I had done none of those things. I had done nothing. Fear had swaddled me in cowardice. Too weak, too pathetic to help, I was as much to blame as the man who held her down. As culpable as the boy who stood watch. Who saw me.
    Why hadn’t he called out? Why didn’t they give chase andhunt me down? Why was I not now weeping somewhere on the forest floor like that poor peasant?
    I rolled forward onto my knees and retched again. Nothing but bile and self-loathing spilled from my mouth.
    The man who had abused her looked prosperous, well fed, sure of himself. The richness of his clothes and the arrogance of his manner characterized someone who expected life to hand him everything he wanted, and if it didn’t, he would take it.
    I thought about what he had said. Had she, at some point, wanted him? She hadn’t appeared to anymore, her face screwed up against his words, her arm pinned down by his crony. No one wanted that.
    I hoisted myself off of the ground, brushed the soil from my hands and knees, and staggered back to the house. The duchess was right. It was wiser to stay closeted indoors.
    I might never leave the house again
.
    The twilight filtered into the oak gallery, shadows like bars running the length of the paneling.
    My skirt hissed along the floor, carried somehow by my trembling limbs. I reached the corridor to the back stairs, and a creak above me took my balance. I fell back, one foot caught on a stray bit of hem, my left hand grasping wildly for support. Anne Boleyn’s falcon caught me.
    “Kitty, if you grow any taller and more awkward, you’ll need your own usher to keep you upright,” Cat laughed, skipping down the last of the stairs and twirling me, stumbling, into the darkened gallery. “Still, as long as he’s handsome . . .”
    “Cat,” I interrupted, and stopped the giddy dance, “I have to tell you something.”
    “Oh, but Kitty,” she said coyly, “it can’t be nearly as important as what I’ve got to tell you.”
    “No,” I said. Meaning, no, don’t tell me. No, don’t speak over me. Don’t tell me your news is more important than this.
    “
Exactement,”
she started toward the north wing of the house. “Let’s find Joan and Alice. They have to hear this, too.”
    She turned when I didn’t follow and looked at me critically.
    “You’re filthy,” she said. “You spend far too much time out in that garden. And you really shouldn’t go out there alone.”
    “I’ve done something horrible,” I blurted.
    “So have I!” Cat cackled, pulling me through the back stairs corridor and into the servants’ vestibule. I crawled after her, mind ablaze with agony.
    “I’ve dumped the contents of every pot in the maidens’ chamber into the one under the duchess’s bed!”
    When I didn’t respond, Cat huffed in irritation, waiting in the doorway to the front vestibule.
    “It’s Mary Lascelles’s job to empty it!” she cried. “She’ll never get down the stairs without spilling, the silly cow. But she brought it on herself. Fools find their own misery.”
    She brought it on herself. She wanted it.
    “And I rubbed rancid fat in her pallet while I was there,” Cat whispered as we walked into the main withdrawing room, clustered with girls and women sewing. “Her bed will be