The Lost Duchess by Jenny Barden Page A

really think of the places of worship of his new faith, despoiled by reformation, bearing the marks like open scars? Rob looked up at the spire then away towards the sound of children’s voices echoing through unseen rooms and empty passages. Did he miss his village friends? He must have felt lonely with no one of his own age to talk to.
    After finding the sexton, and offering a donation, Kit was shown around the hospital where five hundred of the city’s foundlings and orphans were fed, taught and housed. They walked through a dormitory where boys slept two together in long rows of narrow beds; they saw children at work in classrooms, huddled together on benches, heads bent over hornbooks; and they entered a hall resounding with the clacking of looms at which older boys were being taught how to weave.
    ‘Would you like to start a new life in Virginia?’ he asked. ‘But consider this before you answer: it will be dangerous and hard and there’s a chance you might never come back.’
    ‘I’ll go with you,’ answered a tall, broad-shouldered lad with a quiff of gingerish hair and a lopsided smile around broken front teeth. ‘I’ll take the risk.’
    ‘Thomas Humphrey,’ said the master in charge, and waved his stick at which the boys instantly fell silent and lowered their eyes. ‘Found by Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s residence in Limehouse as a babe,’ he added in a way that made Kit itch to clap his hand over the man’s mouth.
    The lad flinched as if slapped then picked at the threads of a tapestry on which he was working.
    ‘I’ll come back for him,’ Kit said quietly.
    Rob tugged at his sleeve and whispered, ‘Can’t he come with us now?’
    Kit shook his head and led Rob away. He wanted to explain that they were guests of Sir Walter at Durham Place and could not presume on his generosity to invite anyone else – and if this lad was taken then where would they stop? Yet stop they would have to, and to prefer some over others would sow the seeds of division. But this was no reasoning for a master to give his page; there was not the time to explain and this was not the place.
    ‘Young Thomas must wait,’ he said.
    Rob’s face fell and, to cheer him up, Kit stopped by an ironmonger’s and bought the boy a fine bone-handled knife. He’d need a good blade in the New World where there’d be no means of procuring another. He also bought two ribbons in soft deep blue silk from a pedlar-woman in the street. They’d be for Mistress Fifield, the maiden whose hand he had reached for when he’d last seen her nearly two months ago, though why he had been so forward he could not rightly understand, and her response had been to flinch from him as if he’d given her a fright. He had not meant that; he had been too hasty. Maybe the fervour of the moment had taken hold – hearing the cheering outside Durham Place that day,knowing the voyage to Virginia had won the Queen’s approval, that it was almost certain to happen and he would be gone in a few months. Perhaps the prospect of another sailing had triggered some impulse to abandon caution, or maybe he had felt sympathy for the maiden alone in that crowded hall – a woman whom everyone else seemed to have forgotten, though her beauty shone like a beacon. The memory of her filled his mind: her sable hair and dark eyes, and cheeks dimpled by smiling, though he sensed that she no longer smiled as easily as she had done once. He had wanted to plant a kiss on her lovely mouth when she had first smiled at him by the Richmond fountain; then, when her smile had faded, he had wanted to say things to bring it back. But he could not kiss a woman freely just because she attracted him as he had done once. Mistress Fifield was beyond his reach. She might want nothing to do with him. She was one of the Queen’s ladies, far above him in station, a lady from whom he would soon be separated by an ocean. So why had he taken her hand? He shouldn’t have been so rash; it must have