As soon as Sarah recognized the man tapping on the small glass pane in the door of her apothecary shop, she knew the Reverend Henry Grove had come bearing bad news. He was aware the shop was closed, having presided over her husband’s funeral just two weeks prior. The Guild would not give permission for the business to reopen until she took on an apprentice.

With Reginald dead and gone, Henry Grove was the only man in Birmingham who knew the secret of Sarah’s parentage. He’d required the information in order to perform the marriage ceremony that had bound her to a man twenty years her senior.

“Herbal tea?” she asked after unlocking the door.

He nodded. “Something calming. You’ll need it.”

She turned the key in the lock and led the way upstairs to the room where she’d lived with Reginald North for five long years. “The kettle’s on the hob,” she said.

A few minutes later, she removed her linen apron, smoothed down her grey wool skirts, straightened her waistcoat and took a seat across from him at the scarred wooden table. The clergyman sipped his steaming camomile tea. She feared her trembling hands might drop the chipped cup, so she let it sit. “I’ll wait for it to cool,” she murmured. “Is it about my father?”

She couldn’t think of any other reason for his presence. The Norths weren’t part of the flock of St. Martin’s, though the church was a scant two-minute walk from the shop. She’d never completely understood why she’d asked Grove to keep in touch with the monks at St. Mary’s Priory in Chepstow.

“Marten’s dead, child,” he replied. “His torment is over.”

She supposed torment was as good a word as any for a sentence of life imprisonment. A vague sense of relieved sadness settled in her heart.

“I didn’t know him,” she said in an effort to explain her lack of outward emotion. “I was born in Oxford three years before my father was sent to the Tower to await trial. Five months after that, he was sentenced to exile on Holy Island; Northumbria was too far away for my mother to travel with an infant and her two siblings.”

Grove sipped his tea, showing no sign of impatience that she was repeating things he likely already knew.

“Henry Marten never set eyes on me again until five years later when he was moved to a cell in Windsor Castle. It was closer to Oxford and my mother bribed a guard to allow a short visit—of which I have no memory.

“Three years later, King Charles II decided Windsor was too close to his own living quarters for comfort. My father was moved to Chepstow Castle.”

“And your mother went to live with him in his apartments there.”

She smiled at the cleric. “You’re an unusual priest. You’ve never once uttered a word of condemnation about my parents’ adulterous relationship.”

Grove shrugged. “Let he who is without sin…When you look back, don’t you admire their commitment to each other, despite the difficulties they faced?”

Sarah scoffed. “My father was unhappily wed to someone else. An adulterer as well as a traitor. But their commitment, as you call it, is the only way to explain why my mother abandoned us when she moved to Chepstow.”

“Well, she had no income, and three little girls to provide for. Perhaps she thought she was doing the right thing, leaving you in the care of Mrs. Flamsteed.”

Sarah nestled her hands around the warm cup and stared at the bits of camomile floating in the tea, remembering. “Peggy and Henrietta were placed in service to two noble households. I was young enough to be sent to the Blue Coat School in Greenwich.”

“Ah, yes. A marvelous endeavor founded by Mrs. Flamsteed for girls whose families had fallen on hard times,” Grove enthused. “If only there were more kind-hearted souls in the world like her.”

“I suppose a life sentence for treason qualified as hard times,” Sarah retorted.

“Now, now,” he chided. “At school you learned about God and were encouraged to have a great horror of vice and a great love of virtue.”

“The irony of that strikes me now I’m an adult,” she confessed. “Though I didn’t know the full gravity of my parents’ sins at the time.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, until Grove finished his tea. “You haven’t asked about your mother.”

A chill crept up Sarah’s nape. “No.”

“The monks report she has nowhere to live. She’s destitute.”

Sarah almost laughed at the irony. Freed at last from her husband’s brutality, surely she wouldn’t be expected to provide for a woman who’d abandoned her. “As you see, I don’t really have anywhere…”

“It’s your duty, Sarah,” he replied. “The Priory will allow her to stay for a short while, until you can fetch her.”

Indignation stiffened her spine. “I can’t go off to Wales. I have to find an apprentice and get the shop re-opened. People need medicinals.”

Grove reached across and patted her hand. “Nevertheless. The coach for Gloucester leaves from The Swan on the morrow.”

Sarah seethed with resentment throughout the long, bone-jarring and sometimes nerve-racking stagecoach ride from Birmingham to Gloucester, and thence to Chepstow. She felt no personal guilt for her father’s crime, but resolved never again to divulge anything of her past to anyone. If she hadn’t asked Grove…

In an effort to soothe her ruffled feathers, she closed her eyes and thought on the years at Blue Coat—happy days of learning that seemed a lifetime ago. She preferred to forget most of what had happened in the years since.

Exhaustion had taken hold by the time she arrived at St. Mary’s Priory in Chepstow.

An old woman swathed in a drab grey frock and threadbare shawl rose stiffly from a rear pew and came to greet her, clutching the strap of a small leather satchel slung across her body. It took a moment for Sarah to recognize the wrinkled face beneath the frayed brim of the bonnet.

“Daughter,” Mary Ward said hoarsely, one gnarled hand gripping the back of the pew. She eyed Sarah’s red woollen dress with obvious disapproval.

“Mama,” she replied, cringing inwardly at the endearment for a person who elicited no feelings, except perhaps pity. She clutched her small portmanteau closer lest her mother decide belatedly to embrace her.

“I’ll show thee the grave, so thou can pay thy respects.”

Sarah stifled the urge to scoff brought on by the old-fashioned Puritan speech and the absurd notion of showing respect for a traitor who’d fathered her out of wedlock.

Their echoing voices drew a scowl from a curate fussing over candles near the altar.

Mary led her to the chancel where a mason was on his knees, chiseling into a flagstone. “Thy father wrote his own epitaph.”

“They buried him here? In the chancel?” Sarah asked with surprise.

“Why not?”

Sarah rolled her eyes, unwilling to voice the word traitor. “No reason.”

The mason looked up, brandishing a faded piece of paper. “It’s clever. Each line begins with a letter of his name. See.”

She peered at the half-finished epitaph.

Here or elsewhere, all’s one to you, or me,

Earth, air or water grips my ghostless dust.

“There’s a line for every letter of his name, H…E…N…” her mother explained further. “Thy father was a man of education and wit.”

Sarah clenched her jaw. She knew Henry Marten had been a lawyer and a member of parliament, but the epitaph seemed too pretentious for a man who’d killed a king. She stared at the flagstone, sickened by the thought of a body crammed into the small space beneath it—a faceless corpse, since she had no recollection of her father’s facial features.

It was probable her sisters were unaware of his demise.

She felt the curate’s glare. It was to be expected he would censure the whore and bastard of an adulterous traitor.

“We should leave soon,” she told the unpleasant-smelling woman she still barely recognized. “I’ve inherited an apothecary shop, but I have to engage an apprentice or the Guild won’t grant me the license.”

Her frowning mother kept her gaze fixed on the mason, seemingly unaware of the circumstances of her daughter’s recent widowhood. “I’d prefer to see it finished.”

Sarah tamped down her impatience, quite sure there’d be no mention in the epitaph that Henry Marten had sired three illegitimate daughters. “We’ll miss the coach back to Gloucester. Do you have baggage?”

Her mother patted the small satchel.

Fuming, Sarah hefted her own portmanteau and led the way out of the church, praying she could at last be free of Marten’s tainted blood.