We met at Wolf Hall. I came there in the summer of fifteen hundred and fifty-seven, in the fourth year of the reign of Mary the Queen. I was a Mary, too, cousin of the late king, Edward, daughter to one dead queen and niece to another. I was ten years old and I already had a reputation for witchcraft. Alison Banestre and I were cousins of a kind. We were both orphans. There the bond between us began and ended: Alison, my enemy. We made a bargain, she and I. It is entirely possible to bargain with an enemy if there is something that you both want and so it proved. Thus we were bound together through time.