I glanced at Barak, who sat stroking his beard, frowning hard. It was an outlandish, extraordinary story, yet it fitted what Lord Parr had told me – that despite their failure to destroy the Queen and those around her, the conservative faction were not downcast, were rather comporting themselves as though they had something else up their sleeves. If this was their trump card, the stakes could not be higher.

‘When did the news about Bertano come?’ I asked.

‘Just after I told our group about overhearing the Queen’s argument with Cranmer over the Lamentation. And we all agreed: if the King decides to go back to Rome, it surely follows that the Queen must be replaced. The Pope would insist on it. But if the Lamentation were published, the populace would see the King had executed a good and true woman.’

I got up and walked to the window. I was horrified. If what Leeman said about Bertano was true, the Queen was in deadly danger from another source, too, and was a dispensable pawn in a far bigger game. It was hard to take in. But at least it seemed Greening’s group had made a majority decision not to publish the Lamentation before the Queen fell, but only to keep it in Greening’s shop. Safe, they supposed.

Barak spoke bluntly to Leeman. ‘Making public that the King was about to receive a secret emissary from the Pope would surely have roused popular anger, perhaps prevented the visit taking place at all.’

‘Ay,’ Nicholas nodded agreement. ‘The outrage among reformers would be tremendous.’

Leeman replied, ‘That is what I said when we discussed Bertano in the group. We argued over it for days.’

I came back to him and sat down again. ‘But Curdy and McKendrick opposed it? I ask, Master Leeman, because I think one of your group might have been a spy in the pay of a third party, I know not who. I am fairly certain, by the way, that we were followed to the docks tonight, and that events there were watched.’

He nodded sadly. ‘That is what we also came to think, after Master Greening was murdered and the Lamentation disappeared. That is why we all fled. Vandersteyn had Anne Askew’s writings, ready to take abroad, so at least the killers would not get them. Afterwards, we realized there must have been a spy, for nobody else knew what we were doing.’ He shook his head. ‘But we thought it was Elias, as he was the only one that refused to leave the country.’

‘He had not been told about the Lamentation, he was too young for such a secret but he could have . . .’

‘He could have overheard. That is what we thought, afterwards. And he needed money, with his family to support.’ Leeman shook his head. ‘Poor Elias.’