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afterward.
    Thus many ingenious hours were stolen and passed in this fashion, from that year into the next. I relished Philip’s company, and that of his friends as well, enjoying a leading role in their merry, wine-laden escapades. Scandal floated about me like a fine-wrought veil, enhancing without touching me. If my name was now often included among those gentlemen and ladies infamous for their exceeding wildness, I did not care. My wantonness only served to burnish my beauty further, and while I was content with one serious lover, so many other gentlemen clamored for my attentions as well that I did on occasion indulge with them. Philip pretended not to notice, nor did I think he really cared, as we were all cut from the same bolt of promiscuous cloth at that time. To my considerable amazement, my mother neither heard nor suspected any of this, or perhaps simply preferred not to. Thus I soon achieved my sixteenth birthday, as pleased with myself as any lady of that tender age ever born.
    But being pleased, like pleasure itself, is a fleeting state, and before long the clouds of discord did gather around my love for Philip. While I was mostly constant to him, he would not so much as pretend faithfulness. He claimed it was man’s base nature to prefer variety, and made no apologies. His name was tied with other ladies, low and high, as well as with servants, milliners’ girls, and the penny-slatterns who let themselves be worked each night against the walls in Drury Lane.
    I could not contain my jealousy, and both railed and wept my bitterness to him, even though I feared such scenes would do more to drive him from me than otherwise. I labored hard to contrive new fancies and games to amuse him and keep his love.
    And in the summer of 1657, it was one such contrivance for Philip’s beguilement that did change my life, and send me on another path, from which there’d be neither recourse nor return.

Chapter Two
    BISHOPSGATE, LONDON
July 1 6 5 7
     
The afternoon sun was warm, and Anne and I had thrown open the windows of her bedchamber to catch whatever breeze might waft past. Fat bumblebees drifted in and out, determined to taste the nectar of the blossoms—sweet William and gillyflowers—that Anne kept in pots on her sill to remind her of her family’s confiscated home and gardens in Scotland. The scent of the flowers was honey-sweet and heady with the warmth of the sun upon them, and the drone of bees made the afternoon drowsy and languid.
    Because of the warmth, and to be more at our ease, Anne and I had shed all our clothes save our cambric smocks, the fine linen our only vestige of modesty as we lay tumbled beside one another on her rumpled bedsheets. It was too hot to bother with more between such dear friends as we, and our conversation was not inclined to cool our passions, either.
    “You let him love you in a boat upon the river ?” Anne squealed at the thought. “Didn’t the waterman take notice?”
    I shrugged, my shoulder bare where my smock had slipped, and sipped the sweetened lemon-water from my tumbler. “What should I care if he did? It was dark, far past midnight, and the light from the boat’s fore lantern wasn’t much. Besides, I’d taken care to spread my skirts over my thighs as I sat astride Philip, so there was little enough to view, save the delight in dear Philip’s face as I rode him to the rhythm of the waves around us.”
    “Oh, Barbara, how wicked of you.” Anne laughed, and with both hands smoothed her unbound hair behind her ears, her way, I knew, of hiding her excitement. She’d had a lover or two and shed her own virgin-skin, though no gentlemen had lasted in her favor. Because her own adventures had been so pallid thus far, she did enjoy to hear me speak frankly of my own.
    “But tell me, dear,” she continued now, “what would you have done if you’d capsized the boat?”
    “What would we have done?” Absently I poked my finger at the lemon slices in my tumbler,