She wished, suddenly and fiercely, that she could talk to Arthur. She reached for her phone and called up his number. Then she stopped, cancelling the call. It had been a totally instinctive reaction but she realised how stupid and potentially dangerous it would be. She barely knew Arthur, no matter the strange connection there was between them. After the police had interviewed her about Amelia’s death, the lawyers had told her to have nothing to do with the Robsart family at all. She’d already broken that commitment several times. Ringing Arthur up and pouring out a weird story about how his brother had been to see her, stolen an ornament that wasn’t hers in the first place and had then vanished was asking for trouble.

She walked over to the window. The view of the river was different from here; she could see the Shard and the News Building on the southern bank, and Blackfriars Bridge lit up in pink and gold above the inky black water. Often the view over London excited her, sometimes it soothed her, but tonight she felt impossibly restless and hemmed in.

Her phone rang in her hand. She did not need to look at the screen to see the caller ID. She instinctively knew exactly who it was.

“You wanted to talk to me,” Arthur said, without preamble.

“Yes.” Lizzie took a deep breath. “Yes, I did.”

14

Amy: Baynard’s Castle, London, Spring 1557

I first saw the ghost boy on the day I had the news that my mother had died. She had been living at Stansfield Manor still, and had been ailing for a while. When he had died, my father had left the manor to her for her lifetime with the stipulation that it would pass to me on her death along with a number of his other estates. I was his heir; he had left nothing to Arthur, yet it was Arthur who had continued to care for my mother in her sickness and it was Arthur whose writing I recognised now on the letter.

I remember everything about that day so clearly. It was very early spring still with more than an edge of winter. The first leaves were starting to tinge the trees with green but the winds were cold. We were at Baynard’s Castle, one of Queen Mary’s favourite palaces. Robert was once more a courtier but our lives had changed out of all recognition. Gone were the estates, the grand style of living, the power, the royal favour. Robert had his freedom but precious little else. The Queen had no fondness for him. How could she, when he had been the man sent to take her captive only five years before? In her eyes he was a traitor and never to be trusted.

Mary’s spies watched us constantly. The Queen was no fool; men spoke disparagingly of her blind stubbornness, that she baulked like a donkey when thwarted, but she knew her false friends and she knew Robert’s loyalty lay with her sister Elizabeth and not with her. No, it was her husband Philip, the Spanish King, who had taken Robert into his retinue and sometimes I thought he had done it deliberately to spite Queen Mary. He had no affection for her though she mooned after him like a young lovestruck maid. Philip disliked her and he hated England and he showed it in many small and petty ways. One of the tools he used to taunt her was his friendship with Robert.