She looked startled for a moment and then smiled at me, a proper smile this time, one that lit her tired eyes. “You are a sweet child, Amy,” she said, patting my cheek. Her smile died. “Except that you are not a child any longer, it seems.”

She sighed. “Do you remember Robert Dudley?” She was watching me very closely. I was not sure what she was looking for. “He asked your father if you would be present at dinner tonight. No...” she corrected herself. “He requested that you should be present, which is a different matter entirely.”

Her look made it clear what she thought of the sons of the nobility asking after a gentleman’s daughter. I suppose she imagined that no good could come of it, despite my father’s ambitions.

“I remember him,” I said. I smiled a little at the memory for a picture had come into my mind, a small, obstinate boy, his black hair standing up on end like a cockerel’s crest, a boy whom the other children had mocked because he was as dark as a Spaniard. More cruelly they had called him a traitor’s grandson because the first Dudley of note had been a lawyer who had risen high in old King Henry’s favour and had then fallen from grace when the new King Henry had wanted to sweep his father’s stables clean. It had all happened before I was born, before Robert had been born too, but the ghost of the past had haunted him. People had long memories and cruel tongues, and as a result he was a child full of anger and fierce defiance, seeming all the more impotent because he had been so small and so young. I had secretly pitied Robert even whilst he had sworn he would be a knight one day and kill anyone who slighted his family name.

“When did you meet him?” Mother was like a terrier after a rat when she saw that smile.

“I met him years ago at Kenninghall,” I said. “And once, I think, when the Duchess took us up to London.”

My mother nodded. I felt the tension ease from her a little. Perhaps she believed that no harm could have come of a meeting between children under the auspices of the Duchess of Norfolk.

“You were very young then,” she said. “I wonder why he remembers you.”

“I was kind to him, I suppose,” I said. “The other children were not.” I remembered dancing with Robert at some childish party at court; Lady Anne Tilney had scorned his proffered hand for the galliard and so he had turned to me as second choice. We must have been all of twelve years old and he had spent the entire dance glaring at Lady Anne and stepping on my toes.

“They may be regretting that unkindness,” my mother said, with another of her wry smiles, “now that his father rivals the Duke of Somerset for the King’s favour.”

A shiver tickled my spine like the ghosts of the past stirring again. I wondered whether Robert’s father had learned nothing from his own father’s fate. Why men chose to climb so high when the risk was so great was a matter on which I had no understanding. It was as though they enjoyed tempting the gods with their recklessness and repeating history over and again.