You arrived in Whitwood a year and a half ago, despondent but determined. You have managed to stay afloat so far - to maintain the truths you hold in your heart, but keep alive the body in which your heart beats. There are lots of words for your beliefs which have never been said aloud, but are engraved on the walls of your heart like Belshazzar’s warning - reformational, evangelical, Lutheran.  To reveal those beliefs would mean death, and not a good or quick death either. The King and Lord Cromwell may dabble with reform, but even they would not accept the truths you have come to believe. 

You are the youngest of eight brothers and sisters, the daughter of a fairly well-to-do London merchant in the cloth trade. Your father is a committed Catholic. He is also a man of great vice and sin as far as you were concerned, although you stopped trying to tell him this when his responses grew too angry for you to bear. He had planned your future from your birth - a place in an abbey - and that was what was going to happen. What you had to say either about your beliefs or about your wishes had no impact on him at all.

Largely left to your own devices while growing up, you developed a love of reading - both your father’s books and the many pamphlets appearing in ever greater numbers from the printing presses of London. Sometimes the King’s Chancellor Thomas More would gather them all up from the print shops and have a bonfire, calling them heretical. You saw their fire as enlightening - a lamp, shining into the darkness that has shrouded the church, and illuminating the way to God. You never managed to get access to any of Luther’s works, but read commentaries and even managed to secure an English gospel from a friendly apprentice who sometimes prayed with you.