Excerpt from A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I cannot dress," mumbled Frances.

Her mother stepped forward, I thought to hold her, but instead she put ringed fingers under her daughter's chin and forced the girl to look at her. Was she envious? The Earl of Suffolk was known to favor Frances above his other children—perhaps above his wife too? Did he whisper in the girl's ear that she understood him best? I have seen daughters thus favored become unhappy wives when they cannot bewitch their spouses as they did their fathers.

"If you do not attend today, your husband will send you to his estate at Chartley, hmm?" she said, as if to a half-wit. "It is far away and comfortless. He will keep you there, whipping you without cease if he wishes, until you submit to your marriage as your sisters have done to theirs."

I sensed the distance between myself and Frances Howard contract and wanted to take her in my arms. It is a hard fate to have a cruel husband. He was barely seventeen and already pitiless.

"You will feel better when you look better," said the older sister, Elizabeth, not kindly.

"Do you?" asked Frances.

The sister flushed. "Your self-interest reflects badly upon us all. You have not even the hardest of it." Frances only shrugged. Her mother put the white object she had been pinching into Frances's hand and tugged her daughter's shift into place as if it were a presentable thing not ripped and bloodied by her son-in-law.

"Please see that she is dressed by midday," she said, neither looking at me nor making clear how she intended to make my intervention worthwhile. She left, trailed by her more tractable daughters.

Frances sent out her maids, then glared at me.

"My mother pays you to make me obedient?"

"Indeed, no. I had no idea why she called me here and will leave at once if you permit it."

The girl narrowed her eyes at me and took a long drink straight from the bottle in the manner of an apprentice on his day off. "I remember who you are now. You are the wife of the fashionable doctor."

"My husband was physician to our late Queen, God rest her soul. We are hardly the latest thing," I said, dissembling. I considered myself ahead of the latest thing.

"And you concoct medicines and colored starch like an apothecary and dress boldly. And word is that you have a lover in the Prince's household. Put off your cloak." The gossip was relayed with a hint of admiration and was true. Even so, I did not like to be spoken to in so familiar a tone by a girl of eighteen years at most.

I could have marched out, as her mother had done, and no one would have blamed me. I was not a servant to be ordered about. My mother was Margaret St. Lowe, sole heir of Sir William St. Lowe. My father, Thomas Norton, was a Cambridgeshire yeoman whose family bore arms with eleven quarterings and had the head of a greyhound in a golden collar as his crest. My two elder brothers had good houses in or near Hinxton, the village where I was born, on the road between Cambridge and Saffron Walden. My youngest brother, Eustace, was falconer to the royal family and my only sister, Mary, had married Sir Edward Hinde, recently knighted, inheriting the family farm after my father's death. My own husband, George, had no title but was a member of the College of Physicians and on good terms with Sir William Paddy, its President. The late Queen herself instructed her Chancellor to recommend his election when the College hesitated due to his Catholicism. It was just as George had said that morning: "The Howards always take more than they give."

Throughout our nineteen-year marriage I had nagged him to take me to Court, to find clients for my fashioning, but he had always refused.

"The place is a cesspit. All depravity is there, bed-hopping and syphilitic, trussed up in velvet. Who could know that better than their doctor? Do we not have enough? We are happy, aren't we?"

"Very happy, husband," I had said, kissing the back of his soft, baggy hand. We shared love for our children and pride in our fine household in Fetter Lane. Of each other we were fond and trusting. Only the Court did he deny me.

Excerpted from A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago. Copyright © 2021 by Lucy Jago. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.