The Girl in the Glass Tower by Elizabeth Fremantle Page A

remember how far she has plummeted in the world, but there’s nothing to be done about it and the hard labour provides a distraction.
    With the beating finished there is rinsing to be done, and then everything must be spread out on the grass to dry. Despite the ache in her back she feels a glow of satisfaction to see the neat rows of bright white linen against a carpet of green. The sun is shining but she wonders what she will dowhen the weather is not so good. She pushes the thought away – there is no space for pessimism here.
    She sits back with the women in the shade of the big oak and they pass round a flagon of small beer, still discussing the trial. She wonders if they gossiped about Lady Arbella out here, when that scandal was in its throes. Of course they did, everybody did. No one talks of her any more though. It is as if she never was.
    ‘Did you go to the witch hanging?’ There is silence and she realizes that all eyes are on her, waiting for her answer.
    She stops herself blurting,
Why ever would I want to watch an innocent woman suffer?
saying instead, ‘I was not able.’
    ‘Shame,’ says Birdy, a dough-faced, stolid woman who couldn’t have been less like a bird if she’d tried. ‘It was quite an occasion.’
    ‘Next time come with us,’ says Dill. Ami has noticed that the others always agree with Dill. ‘P’raps they’ll hang that countess. I’d like to see that, but she’ll be done in private, I s’pose – not for the likes of us.’
    Their eagerness is monstrous. Ami feels the gulf between her and these women and understands the depth of her loneliness since Hal departed for court, for though it is a mere two-week absence it signals the beginning of a more permanent departure. She cannot hold on to him for ever.
    After the long day she has no energy to eat more than a hunk of bread with some dripping and, anyway, she is impatient to get back to her reading. But soon it will be too dark to read and candles are an expense she can ill afford. She considers using some of the dripping to make rush-lights, which would offer a few minutes of sputtering flame, but she has no rushes. Anyway, she finds herself dropping off even before darkness has fallen. She dreams that Lady Arbella is right there in front of her, speaking, saying something of great importance:
I want you to know that …
She is on thebrink of knowing, but the voice fades and she can hear nothing.
    The next evening it is the same, and the next; her exhaustion gets the better of her and she makes excruciatingly slow progress with her reading. It is as if the manuscript bewitches her to sleep rather than revealing its secrets. But at least Mansfield is off her back.
    When she arrives for the fourth consecutive day at the backfield, Dill says, ‘Four large loads in a week; that’s a lot of washing for one household, particularly as you live
alone
.’ The way she says it, with narrowed eyes, makes it clear that she is thinking more than she lets on.
    ‘Looks to me like she’s taking it in,’ says Birdy, looking directly at Ami, though addressing Dill.
    Birdy had been glad to help Ami lift a heavy load of sodden sheets out of the bucking tub only the day before and had given her a gentle ribbing for her fine manners and all her ‘pleasing and thanking’, as she’d put it. She hadn’t meant it unkindly and had said, ‘Anyone can find themselves on hard times, wherever it is they might have started off.’
    Ami understood that, however hard she tried to blend in, she was as rarefied in the eyes of those laundresses as the noblewomen at court had been to her. She knows only too well that difference at best causes curiosity but more often can be the source of suspicion. With the reception she gets on that fourth day, she realizes that while she was assumed to be nothing more than a woman fallen on hard times and having to do her own household linens, she was welcome in their ranks. But now they suppose her to be an impostor, a