PHOEBE
Great St. Bartholomew's, London
22 April (St. George's Eve), 1613
The stars were hidden at my birth. There was no moon. A tempest rising in the west sent clouds that settled like a veil of black across the night sky, and my father feared this total darkness was a sign of trouble.
The doctor of astrology he summoned reassured him that my future would be fortunate. My stars, although unseen, would serve me well.
Through all that followed after, and with all we lost, my father held those words so closely to his heart they might have been a rope tossed out upon the water to a drowning man. "Whatever happens in your life," he'd often tell me, "you'll be guided by the planets and their motions. They will lead you to your destiny."
I let him keep his fancies.
But this morning as I stormed across the grass still wet with dew, I felt convinced that any planets guiding me were misaligned. They'd started this day poorly, and since there was truth in the old saying that an ill beginning led to an ill end, I knew my morning would do nothing but get worse.
The front door of our house, though heavy, gave way to my forceful push.
"He is the most infuriating man."
I spoke those words to no one but myself as I was entering the kitchen, yet my father and his elder sister—my Aunt Agnes—heard me notwithstanding and immediately knew which man I meant.
My father, fitting on his doublet, asked, "What has he done to sour thy mood this morning, with the sun so newly up?"
The truth was, Andrew Logan had to do no more than stand within my sight to sour my mood. He'd been our neighbor ten years, since the death of Queen Elizabeth had passed her crown to Scotland's King James, binding both the courts in one and bringing Logan's family south to London in his service. And in all that time I could not think of once my path had crossed with Logan's when he hadn't left me irritated. Nor when I'd been granted the last word.
It was that final point, in truth, that had me most annoyed this morning, because having put the distance of the courtyard between myself and Logan now, my mind could rapidly frame several sharp replies to his last comment, any one of which would have done better than the gaping silence in which I'd watched the big Scotsman's back retreating from my view.
I had been unprepared. I did not often see him at the conduit—most days one of his sisters fetched the water—and hearing the old gardener who came there every morning fawn and laugh and praise him for his drunken misdeeds of the night before had made my temper flare.
I freed my shoulders from the hard yoke with a force that made the pails thump to the floor and told my father all the details, as I'd gleaned them from the gardener's talk, of Logan's violence. Then I said, "I merely asked him if, by daylight, he did not feel shame for his attack upon a better man."
My father's eyebrows lifted. "And what did young Logan say to that?"
"That he would feel no shame for having done what needed doing, and if I stood in defense of Valentine I had his pity." His contempt, he might have said, for it showed plainly in his eyes while he was speaking, and for one weak moment I had been confused enough to want to ask him why, but then he'd wheeled away abruptly and eventually I'd turned my own back, too, and we had neither of us wasted any further breath in argument.
Aunt Agnes disliked conflict. She brushed the subject away with a move of her hand, as she might wave aside rising smoke from the fire at the hearth where she sat with the linens and hose she was patiently mending. "'Tis but words," she reminded me. "Valentine Fox can defend himself."
"I know he can," I said, and trusted my voice sounded confident. Privately, I was less sure. I'd seen Valentine give a display of his swordsmanship, and with his height and lean form he would make an impressive opponent, but Andrew Logan was built like a great, brainless ox, and in a fight with fists—as it apparently had been last night—the odds fell in his favor.
