Mary drops my hand and walks a little closer to the two men, while I hang back. Nobody ever notices Mary: she should be one of Cecil’s many spies. She can weave her way around men as if she were a beggar child, and they never see her. She follows on their heels for a little while, quite unnoticed, and then she slows up and waits for me to catch up, her eyes shocked and wide, as if she has stared at horrors.

“He said that the queen and Sir Robert are planning to murder Amy Dudley, and Robert will marry the queen,” she whispers urgently, almost choking on her words. “Cecil said it himself! I heard him. He says that they are giving out that she has a canker and the queen will marry Robert, but that the country will never stand for it.”

“He never said that to de la Quadra?” I see my own disbelief in my sister’s face. “The Spanish ambassador? When every word he hears goes straight back to Spain! Why would Cecil tell him such a thing?”

“He did. I could not mistake it.”

I shake my head. “It makes no sense.”

“I heard it!”

“My God, are they really going to kill Amy Dudley? Shouldn’t we stop them?”

I see my shock on Mary’s face. “Who could we tell? How could we stop them? If Cecil himself knows and is not stopping them.”

“But the queen can’t just murder someone, not even a rival. It can’t happen.”

“Cecil says it will be her undoing. He says the country will rise against her rather than have a murderer on the throne. He says he is going to his home.”

I can’t understand any of this. Would Cecil really desert Elizabeth? The queen he has made? Would he leave her to commit a terrible crime that would cost her her soul and her kingdom? And if he did—I think, if he does—then will he come to me and offer to make me queen in her place?

“He said he couldn’t bear to advise her with Robert Dudley whispering in her other ear; he said that the country would never tolerate a Dudley as king consort.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” I say begrudgingly, thinking of my sister Jane refusing to crown this man’s brother, her husband, Guildford, because of the treachery of his grandfather. “No one would accept a Dudley near the throne ever again.”

“But to say it to the Spanish ambassador?” Mary is aghast. “He told the ambassador that she has no credit, that the country is bankrupted. I swear he said that she and Robert are going to murder Lady Dudley. He said it. He said it, Katherine!” She shakes her head in an odd gesture, as if she is tapping water from her ears. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Cecil, denouncing the queen—to the Spanish?”