The groom knocked vigorously at the door and I shivered for we were deep in shadow here. The tall brick gables of the hall loomed high over us. A black-clad servant showed me into the hall and left me for an age seated on a horribly uncomfortable wooden chair; I believe they wanted me gone. However, I had a commission and I was engaged upon it. I waited.

Eventually one of Elizabeth’s ladies, also in black, swept me up and carried me away to a little panelled antechamber. She was impatient. She had no time for this.

“You can give Sir Robert’s message to me,” she said to me, holding out her hand imperatively. “I will see that it reaches the Lady Elizabeth.”

I had been expecting this. “I beg your pardon, ma’am,” I said, with a respectful curtsey to soften the refusal, “but Sir Robert insisted I hand it to none other than her highness herself.”

My choice of address for the Princess did not go unnoticed, just as I had intended. Here in this house, loyalties were split like shards of glass. Some of the Princess’s ladies spied for the Queen. Others were dedicated to her service. This woman, Lady Vane, I knew to be one of the latter for her mother had been a friend to Queen Anne Boleyn.

I saw the expression shift in Lady Vane’s eyes and her manner thawed a very little.

“Sir Robert’s devotion to Her Highness has always been appreciated,” she said.

“He is indeed most devoted,” I agreed smoothly. “No one could be more loyal to her.”

The truth of my words mocked me. What other man would send his wife with a message to the woman he loved?

I waited. After a moment Lady Vane had come to her decision. She nodded. “Follow me,” she said.

I had travelled over twenty miles from Throcking to Hatfield in order to deliver Robert’s gift to the Lady Elizabeth but those last few steps through the shabby old house were the most difficult for I hated her so much. In my imagination I had turned her into a monster. My heart was thumping so hard I thought my steps would falter. Yet when I walked into the library and saw her sitting at the octagonal table, her head bent over her book in the prettiest pose imaginable, my first sensation was disappointment rather than anything else.

She is but a woman like me.

I had seen her before, of course, but I realised that in my jealousy I had built her up to be more than she truly was. After all, she was my own age, and less beautiful than I, and her history was mired in scandal. What was there here to fear? What was there to hate?

A moment later I knew the answer, for she looked up, haloed in a sunlight that turned her hair to spun copper and gold. She was dazzling, radiant, not simply to my eyes but somehow to my soul as well. I saw her and recognised her worth. Robert had been right; Elizabeth was special. She burned with a spark few could ever match, certainly not the Queen, her embittered husk of a sister. Elizabeth was everything that Mary was not, charming, clever as a scholar, demure as a milkmaid, cunning as a thief. Had she not been all of those things and more she would have been dead before now.