Robert’s gaze scanned my face for one impossibly angry moment. Then he shrugged, some of the tension going out of him. “What if it is?” he said. “Someone must steer the Kingdom.”

“Don’t you see?” I burst out. “I am afraid for you! I am afraid for us! I am your wife, Robert. I do not want to lose you.”

It was, by good fortune, the best thing I could have said. His face cleared miraculously and he pulled me close and wrapped his arms about me. “Sweetheart,” he said, against my hair, “you will never lose me. I swear it.”

He tilted up my chin and kissed me. There was some of the old fervour in that embrace; I could see he was lit with excitement just as he had been that night we had met at Stansfield. For Robert the game was all and the riskier the better. “This is for us,” he whispered, as he let me go. “There is no limit to how high we can climb, Amy, with a Dudley Queen on the throne.”

I did not think that the Lady Elizabeth would wish to bend the knee to a Dudley Queen and I wondered how this ambition squared with Robert’s loyalty to her. However, I had the sense to say no more for those sweet moments were increasingly rare between us even if to me they secretly felt poisoned. Robert’s fingers were entangled with mine and he kissed my hand as he released me, and then he was gone, his mind already on the weightier matters of treason, and I was left in the window embrasure, staring after him.

That same day Robert left for Cambridgeshire, tasked with hunting down Princess Mary and her supporters. Knowing Robert, I imagine he had no fear of failure. His father was busy trying to buy the support of the privy council and I clung to the Duchess and my sisters-in-law, an unhappy little assemblage of Dudley wives who tried to put on a brave face whilst we waited endlessly for news.

It came that evening, when the window embrasures were thrown wide to try to draw in the slightest breath of coolness in a London summer that felt as overheated as a powder keg. We had abandoned any attempt to play at cards and were conversing in low voices whilst our ears strained for any sound that a messenger might have arrived. It was a terrible, nervous time; I had not eaten for several days, picking anxiously over my food, staying within doors because it was too dangerous to venture out. We all knew that Queen Jane could not command the support of the people and dreaded what was to come.

Even so, the messenger took us by surprise for it was the Duke himself. He swept into the room and we scattered like chaff; he went straight to his wife and took her hands in his.

“Forgive me, Jane,” he said, and afterwards I wondered whether he was apologising for the entire, ill-founded disaster. “I have to leave. Robert pursued the Princess Mary as far as Sawston, but he was too late. The east is rising to support her now; I must take an army.”