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“I could hear your voice halfway down the gallery,” he admonished me.

“God restored me.”

“So it would seem. And in full volume. Is it wise to run a horse at full gallop who has lain ill and languished in his stall a fortnight? Gradual, and by degrees—that is the way to sound health.”

He checked my throat, my chest, my leg. The wound had all but disappeared. Drained and healed over, it looked so inculpable and innocuous. The rotten traitor! Traitor no less than my northern subjects!

“Your heart started up suddenly,” he said in alarm. “You must avoid exciting thoughts.” He put away his listening tube. And smiled. “But I must say, the Lord in His mercy appears to have healed you.”

With a few more instructions regarding my food, drink, and rest, he was gone. I was free of my body-bondage once more.

By the time Brandon reached Cambridge, word came that the rebellion had burnt out, having consumed its own fuel. There was no need for him to apply the stern measure of the law, and so he returned by Easter, when spring was breaking on the court.

CV

Spring and Easter were enveloped, for me, in a web of preparations for our northern progress. As the grass brightened and exploded in green, and the bare branches of every tree and bush suddenly turned into feathery brushes, it was hard to believe that there were places in the realm of England where winter still held the land and reigned. Children shrieked and played out of doors—I could hear them from the opened casements—at marbles, skip-rope, and pace-egging, where they cracked their Easter eggs together. Their cries rose lean and eager, like a wild animal kept too long indoors and now celebrating its freedom. Before nightfall there would be skinned knees and lost scarves. That, too, was part of the celebration.

By day I studied dispatches and made up orderly lists of supplies and courtiers for the journey. There was so much protocol to be observed. There must, of course, be a striking difference between how the remnants of the traitorous rebels were recerestored to health, as if those horrible days in March had never occurred. The leg was behaving itself I handed her the rose, the unique, commissioned rose.

“Yes?” She took it without looking and smiled, still eagerly.

“You hold it.”

Only then did she examine the rose, exclaim over it. When I explained its symbolism, she wept.

CVI

Departure day was to be July first. God thought otherwise and sent deluges from the skies. All told, it was three weeks before the rains stopped and the roads dried sufficiently to permit travel. That gave the Scots extra time to decide how to respond to my invitation to a parley, and gave us longer to ready the great abbey hall of St. Mary’s in York to receive them.

I shall not recount the long journey in tedious detail. With so many of us travelling—there were one thousand retainers, officers, and companions—our lodging was of the greatest importance. Even the wealthiest nobles did not have accommodations for so great a company, so we provided two hundred of our own luxurious tents to make up the difference. Yes, the journey itself, the protocol, the lodgings, the obligatory entertainments (which should be renamed “borements”) were dull. But the countryside!

Oh, why had I not seen all of England before? I was captivated by the landscape itself, yes. But more by the people. Each population retained the stamp of its origin and past. As we travelled northward, the people became taller and fairer. On the border of Norfolk, their eyes were as blue as a clear October day, almost to a person. “Dane blood,” said Dr. Butts, who made a hobby of studying this sort of thing. “This is the side of England where the Danes settled, where Norsemen raided. From the Danes you get the blue eyes, from the raiders the red hair.” He pointed to a fiery-haired lad perched on a market cross to glimpse us as we passed. “Sweet child, to bear the marks of such a brutal past.”

They talked differently, too. At times I could not make out certain words in the courteous little