![]() ![]() I touched her shoulder and a moment later she stopped. I did not know what to say, so I said nothing. After a few moments of silence, she began to weep. She had not seen the sea herself since coming to England from Spain at fourteen as a maid of honor to Katherine of Aragon. But when we reached it, and I gazed for the first time at those churning gray waves, my mother’s temper changed. The day after we arrived, my mother, greatly excited, took me to the shore overlooking the sea. Once in London, my father remained in our house on the Strand, seeing to business, while we rode on with two servants to Canterbury. ![]() She told him she feared for my life if I did not take the healing waters at a bath she knew of in Canterbury, to cure me of melancholia. A bout of sweating sickness struck the South that summer and he feared we’d lose our lives to the lingering reach of that disease. At the beginning of each autumn my father traveled to London to attend to family business, but he had not wanted me or my mother to accompany him. ![]() I was seventeen, and I had made the long journey down to Canterbury from my home, Stafford Castle. Before the lash of the wind drew blood, before I felt it first move through the air, our horses knew that something was coming. ![]()
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