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told her to look after her own, and to hell with the rest. The adulation made her run faster and stronger, gathering power as she lost control.
    But within Venetia ran a crack, which fame had covered, and now her fame was gone the crack showed again, deeper and wider. The attention she received curdled to scrutiny, the envious admiration to calumny, or pity. And that was only the beginning, only the first turning of the tide that would roll against her, now her name was two broken promises. In the year of her birth, only maggot-brained philosophers would repeat the heresy that the earth moved round the sun. But the printing presses shifted heaven and earth, so that our sublunary pit was re-imagined as a magnetic ball or ‘terrella’, which rotated around the sky, and by the time she was thirty this was the new orthodoxy, and there was a new king.
    No wonder she wore a mask and veil these days, now she had tired eyes, and even the new king was no longer new, and the earth moved round the sun.

Dapper: I long to see her Grace.
Subtle: You must be bath’d and fumigated first:
Besides, the Queen of Fairy does not rise
Till it be noon.
Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 1610
    Bidding her coachman wait behind a brake of trees, Venetia climbed out at a spot near the Dingles, the bank of cottages beyond the loam pits at the far side of the village of Clophill, six miles from Gayhurst. Hooded, and wearing her tall wooden chopine platforms, she picked her way around a chicken-foot lying on the verge at the crossroads. She was undertaking to visit one Begg Gurley. Most tradespeople – hatters, seamstresses, apothecaries – visited Lady Digby at home, but Begg Gurley was not exactly a tradesperson. She did not pay calls, as she might be apprehended in the street for soliciting her devious trade; she left no footsteps for fear they would be filled with wax by her enemies and thus her feet turned lame. If Venetia was discovered at her cottage, at least it would be clear she had come of her own accord. Blind Begg Gurley was a wise-woman, and some called her Dame Kind, or Mother Nature, while others called her Witch.
    As she approached the cottages, with their flags of chimney smoke flying, a mongrel licking its flank eyed her from one doorstep, and a dirty child ran away shrieking. She had been here once before, seeking advice on how to make friends with Kenelm’s mother Mary Mulsho, and together they had wrapped Mary Mulsho’s dirty kerchief up in string and buried it in the garden, and although Venetia had found the whole process a little embarrassing, still, who was to prove it had not worked?
    ‘Is that my friend Lady Diggy?’ she heard a voice call within. ‘Will she not pull back the curtain?’
    Venetia did so, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the smoky room, she recognised the huge motherly figure of Begg Gurley sitting in her wicker chair, her head back, her eyes closed, her hands poised apart on her knees. As she felt Venetia’s shadow her eyes flipped open.
    ‘Oh my lady,’ she said quietly, looking straight through Venetia with cloudy white eyes. ‘You poor lady.’
    She stretched open her arms wide and Venetia fell to be hugged to her bosom. ‘There, there.’ Burying her face in the rough flannel of her frontage, Venetia cried a brief burst of tears that came from nowhere like rain in April. ‘There, there,’ said Mother Nature, patting her back. ‘Begg will make all better. Is it my Lord Sir Kenelm?’
    ‘Yes, I fear his lack of love,’ said Venetia, sniffing.
    ‘Is it my Lord’s absence?’
    ‘No. He is so good to me and I only hope he means it.’
    Venetia felt understanding radiating from Begg. She was even comforted by her purblindness because it meant she could not turn an assessing eye upon her face.
    Afterwards, Venetia could not recall how Begg had seemed to know everything without being told. In fact, Venetia had spoken a great deal, and talked of many private matters, while Begg said again and again