She would have been shocked if she had believed him. ‘How can you lose your faith?’ she asked simply.

He looked away, over his garden. Was it on the island? Did his faith fall sick like the soldiers who had to sleep on the wet ground? Or did it drown in the sea where the causeway was treacherous and they lost the last standard? Or did it bleed to death on the voyage home when the injured men cried out so loud that he heard them, even over the noise of the creaking ship? Was it always a chain that had linked John to his lord, the lord to the king and the king to God, and the loss of one meant the loss of all? Or had he forgotten his faith just as he had forgotten everything, even the gillyflower and the wormwood plants, because he had fallen deep into love and deep into joy and made a god of another man?

‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps God has lost me.’

Elizabeth bowed her head and made a quick silent prayer that she might have guidance as to how she might help him.

‘You are right, and you have been right all along,’ he said at last. ‘We are ruled by a fool who is in the hands of a knave. I have seen men die for the folly of those two, for all my life: in the plague in London, in the villages up and down the land where people are driven out of their homes and out of their gardens for the landlords to make sheep runs, and on that cursed island where we set a siege with less food in our stores than the besieged, where we marched with ploughboys and criminals, where we had scaling ladders which were yards too short, and where the commander was playing at soldiers, and the king forgot to reinforce us.’

His bitterness was like an explosion in that quiet garden, even worse than his blasphemy. She had thought she would never hear such words from him, who had been Cecil’s man, who had served the old queen. This was a stranger to her – a bitter man carrying the scars of fatal betrayal, who finally spoke treason aloud.

‘John –’

He bared his teeth in a hard smile at her surprise. ‘You should be pleased,’ he said cruelly. ‘You warned me enough. Now see: I have heeded your teachings and lost my faith in my lord, in my king, and in my God. Wasn’t that what you wanted?’

Dumbly she shook her head.

‘Didn’t you warn me and warn me that he was a sodomite and a puppet master? Didn’t you beg me to leave his service on the very day we came here? Didn’t you give me a long spoon to sup with the Devil when I started keeping his secrets safe?’