Frankie was beside herself with fury at Elwes, but I saw it as inevitable. Just as Weston had never been paid what he was promised, Frankie and Carr had been neglectful of Elwes. Had he been cosseted by them, he would have had no cause to make so horrendous a blunder. Elwes’s confession had been sent to the King some months before. It was he who had ordered the investigation, behind Carr’s back, which had led to Weston’s arrest. The last line of his letter burned across my mind’s eye: if you cause me to call you ingrate, no earthly plague shall be worse than my wrath. He had given up on Carr, and now the King himself was our enemy.

At night I sat beside the children as they slept, Henry sprawled among the warm, soft-breathing bodies of his sisters. I lit a new candle each time the previous one burned down. It was inevitable that I would be questioned. How could I ever explain my arrest to them?

Frankie stayed by my side, even for much of the night, as neither of us could sleep. We talked quietly through our story, agreeing on the smallest details. We would deny everything; Frankie had learned this during the scandal over Mary Woods: the most important thing was to insist on our innocence and not yield.

The wolves could not wait to tear us apart. Frankie’s steward brought us the broadsheets, reluctantly, in which we read that “for a whore’s sake, Carr murdered his dearest friend,” and that he was capable of heinous crimes because he was a foreigner, low-born, lenient to Catholics, too fond of fashion and extravagance and, most important, already guilty of that darkling sin of too great a love for the King. It was not difficult to know who had fed this effluent to the newsmongers.

“They’re saying that Lord Northampton is not dead but in Rome with the Jesuits and that he, together with Robin, poisoned Prince Henry as well as Sir Thomas,” she read out. Suddenly she dropped to her knees and scrabbled together the printed pages that littered the chamber floor, snatching one from my fingers and flinging the whole lot on the fire. “We should leave for Greys.”

“What point is there? Weston is known to be my helpmeet. It will not be long before they come for me.”

Frankie and Carr argued constantly, both of them in tears. She insisted on the coroner’s verdict, overseen by fourteen witnesses, that Overbury had died by God’s hand, and dismissed everything else as a malicious attempt to bring them down. Elwes had been bribed by their enemies, she insisted, and there was no truth in his confession.

When the maid came for me at ten in the morning on the fourth day, my children were at their lessons. I kissed them and pressed all the love in my heart into the skin of their cheeks.