But then, it may be that Jane Rochford is lying. She has cause.

‘I am not often perplexed,’ he says, ‘about how to proceed, but I find I have to deal with a matter I hardly dare speak of. I can only partly describe it, so I do not know how to draw up a charge sheet. I feel like one of those men who shows a freak at a fair.’

At a fair the drunken churls throw down their money, and then they disdain what you offer. ‘Call that a freak? That’s nothing to my wife’s mother!’

And all their fellows slap them on the back and chortle.

But then you say to them, well, neighbours, I showed you that only to test your mettle. Part with a penny more, and I shall show you what I have here in the back of the tent. It is a sight to make hardened men quail. And I guarantee that you have never seen devil’s work like it.

And then they look. And then they throw up on their boots. And then you count the money. And lock it in your strongbox.

Mark at Stepney. ‘He has brought his instrument,’ Richard says. ‘His lute.’

‘Tell him to leave it without.’

If Mark was blithe before, he is suspicious now, tentative. On the threshold, ‘I thought, sir, I was to entertain you?’

‘Make no doubt of it.’

‘I had thought there would be a great company, sir.’

‘You know my nephew, Master Richard Cromwell?’

‘Still, I am happy to play for you. Perhaps you want me to hear your singing children?’

‘Not today. In the circumstances you might be tempted to overpraise them. But will you sit down, and take a cup of wine with us?’

‘It would be a charity if you could put us in the way of a rebec player,’ Richard says. ‘We have but the one, and he is always running off to Farnham to see his family.’

‘Poor boy,’ he says in Flemish, ‘I think he is homesick.’

Mark looks up. ‘I did not know you spoke my language.’

‘I know you did not. Or you would not have used it to be so disrespectful of me.’

‘I am sure, sir, I never meant any harm.’ Mark can’t remember, what he’s said or not said about his host. But his face shows he recalls the general tenor of it.

‘You forecast I should be hanged.’ He spreads his arms. ‘Yet I live and breathe. But I am in a difficulty, and although you do not like me, I have no choice but to come to you. So I ask your charity.’

Mark sits, his lips slightly parted, his back rigid, and one foot pointing to the door, showing he would very much like to be out of it.

‘You see.’ He puts his palms together: as if Mark were a saint on a plinth. ‘My master the king and my mistress the queen are at odds. Everybody knows it. Now, my dearest wish is to reconcile them. For the comfort of the whole realm.’