“He will, thank you,” I say. I bend to kiss her and she hauls herself up onto the window seat. “Is that Ned’s window?” she asks, looking across at the White Tower where a blue scarf flutters from one of the hinges.

“Yes. He puts out a scarf to show me he is well in the morning, and I do the same,” I say. “If he was ill, he would put out a white scarf, and if he is released, he will fly nothing.”

She nods. She does not ask what standard will be flown from the window for bad news. Nobody in the Tower wants to prepare for bad news. Only my sister Jane had the courage to look forward to her death and write to me of learning to die.

“The court is leaving London,” she says. “I’m to go, too. She’s not being unpleasant. You would think I was nothing to do with you and no kinswoman to her at all. She treats me as any one of her ladies. She likes any one of them better than me; she gives Thomasina the dwarf more attention. I go everywhere with the court and I dine with the ladies. She barely speaks to me and she often fails to see I am there. But she treats others far worse.”

“Oh, who does she treat worse?” I ask, intrigued.

“Our cousin Margaret Douglas for one,” Mary says quietly. “She’s under house arrest at the Charterhouse at Sheen, suspected of treason.”

I muffle my gasp with a hand to my mouth. “Another cousin under arrest? And in our old house?”

“They say that she was trying to get her son Henry Stuart married to Mary Queen of Scots.”

“Was she?”

“Almost certainly; but why should she not? It would be a wonderful match for him, an adequate match for her, and an English king consort in Scotland would be better for us than a Frenchman.”

“Is the whole family arrested?”

“Her husband is held here, I think, in the Tower. But her son has disappeared.”

I put my hands to my head, as if I would pull my own hair. “What? This is madness.”

“I know,” Mary says gloomily. “Elizabeth is crazed with fear like her father. And I have to serve her. And I have to go wherever she fancies.”

“If only you could get away,” I whisper.

Mary shakes her head. “They’d use it against you. No, I’ll go on progress and pretend to enjoy it.”

I put my hand over hers. “Where are you going this year?”

“North. We’re to stay at Nottingham, and she’s commanded a masque. Everyone is in it. Me, too. I play an angel of peace on a swing. The masque is called Britain and the King. It goes on for three days.”

“Heavens.”