“I know it is,” Lizzie said. “That’s why I’ll manage on my own. But thank you anyway.”

There was a movement behind her. She spun around.

“Lizzie,” Arthur said.

She turned to look at him. “I’d never do anything to hurt Johnny,” she said, and despite the crowd of people around them she spoke to him alone and let the defences in her mind fall, hoping that somehow, he could read through to her heart the way she could read him.

“I know,” Arthur said.

And then they took her away.

16

Amy: Hatfield, Hertfordshire, Summer 1557

I had grown up in the country and learned to ride as a child, but it was typical of Robert’s attitude towards me that whenever we had travelled, I had either been transported by litter or been given the least challenging of horses to ride. Indeed, some of them had seemed so docile that it was difficult to encourage them to move at all. Robert loved to hunt but had seldom encouraged me to accompany him. In the beginning I had fondly interpreted this as a sign of his care for me; I felt like a china doll, so proud to be cosseted. Later I came to realise that it was merely another sign of Robert’s contempt for me. He had never asked if I could ride well and assumed that I could not.

William Hyde, whose care I had been consigned to whilst Robert was out of the country with King Philip, had evidently been given the same instruction for he wrapped me about with so much caution and coddling that a vain woman would believe herself highly prized.

“We must take care of you as well as Sir Robert would do,” he would declare roguishly when I expressed a desire to take the air and he refused to allow it. “You cannot go out at present, there is too chill a wind.” In such small ways he made my life a misery.

Today was different, however. Today I had been allowed out—under the strict supervision of Mr Hyde’s grooms—because Robert had an important commission for me to fulfil, and as I reined in my horse on the rising land above Hatfield House, I felt the smallest frisson of pleasure to be out in the world.

The Princess Elizabeth’s house was considered a palace but even I could see the irony in that. She might have been happy there as a child, sharing her brother’s education, but now the brick walls were her prison. Queen Mary knew that her sister was as unscrupulous as a usurer and as sly as a fox. The Queen had set her under lock and key here, and I admired her for it.

My move from the court in London to Throcking in Hertfordshire now made a great deal of sense. As I had thought, it was nothing to do with me, and all to do with the Princess Elizabeth. Robert wanted me to be close by her so I could run the errands to her that he could not. Had he shown me but an ounce of the unswerving devotion he had for her I would have laid down my life for him. Yet that was as nothing to him. He could not even see me when Elizabeth was in his mind, for she eclipsed all else as the sun eclipses the moon. Robert was dazzled, blinded. He had to be to take such risks when his position under Queen Mary was so precarious.