Mrs Mutlowe was bracing and as usual she had brought nothing but trenchant advice: “Perhaps if you were to take the air more you would find that your humour improved,” she said. Mrs Mutlowe, so conscious that she was lower born than the rest of us, made a virtue of plain speaking. “I’m a plain woman and I speak as I find,” she would say.

In truth I knew that they were all gleeful to discover me still so downcast. Misery loves company; their lives were almost as tedious as mine and it comforted them to see that for all my name and my status, I had a worse time of it than they. I was very glad of their spite. From the moment I had come to Cumnor Place I had used them to spread the rumours I wanted told against Robert:

“Poor Amy Dudley is ailing again...”

“She is so neglected she is in a despair.”

“She has a malady of the breast...”

“She fears poison...”

For the past six months I had watched and listened as the stories of my unhappy life rippled outward like water from a tainted pool. I had followed their journey in my mind as they flowed from neighbour to neighbour, through alehouses and inns. I knew that they would run like a plague of rats through the villages and towns as far as all the great houses of England, for that was what gossip and scandal did. In time the tide of it would reach London and the court of Queen Elizabeth herself where my husband basked in her laughter and occupied her virgin’s bed.

“The wife of the Queen’s favourite is such a sweet-natured, beautiful lady... She has been shamefully abandoned and is in fear of her life...”

I had even greater ambitions for those stories. I wanted them to take sail across the sea to the courts of Europe, travelling through ambassadors’ quills and merchants’ talk, until they returned to England much embroidered. I wanted the whole country, the whole of Europe, to hate my husband.

Robert, of course, had no notion how I stoked that fire of scandal. He wrote to me complaining that men spoke against him and that it would ruin all our plans. I wrote back soothingly, telling him I did all that I could to stem the flow of malice. My friends know how content I am, I wrote, and will spread the word to counter these vicious slanders.

Alas for Robert, he believed me. The hope that he would soon be free to court the Queen dazzled him even more than before. He was drunk on her presence, on her very being. I hated that she possessed the power to entrance him so but I could see its uses. She kept him occupied. His obsession addled his brain and he had no more idea that I was deceiving him than that he could fly to the moon.

Poor Robert, he never divined my plan, that I would take his money and his papers and begin my new life whilst he was perpetually locked into the old one. I knew that no matter how or why I “died” Robert’s enemies would use it against him. He would never be able to escape the shadow of suspicion. It was a nightmare malady, incurable. The Queen would not marry him. He would never attain his heart’s desire. Cruel revenge, perhaps, but he had stolen my life. I could have been a wife and mother, the mistress of a fine house and a great estate, not some wraith passing from place to place.