Her face crumples at once. “Oh, don’t say it, don’t say it,” she whispers. She comes to me and at the scent of her hair and the touch of her hand I open my arms and she falls into them, closes herself to me, cries against my chest, a weak woman after all.

“There,” I say. “There, there.” Sometimes I ask too much of her. She is only a woman and she takes strange fearful fancies. She cannot think clearly like a man, and she has no education and no reading. She is only a woman: everyone knows that women have no steadiness of mind. I should protect her from the wider world of the court, not complain that she lacks a man’s understanding. I stroke the smoothness of her hair and I feel my love for her from my bowels to my heart.

“I shall go to London,” I promise her quietly. “I shall take you and the queen to Tutbury, and as soon as her new guardian arrives to replace me, I will go to London and tell the queen herself that I knew nothing of any plot. I am guilty of no plot. Everyone knew what I knew. I shall tell her that all I have ever done is to pray for the return of the England of her father. Henry’s England, not Cecil’s England.”

“Anyway Cecil knew, whatever he says now,” Bess declares indignantly, struggling out from my arms. “He knew of this plot long before it was hatched. He knew of the betrothal as well as any of us, as soon as any of us. He could have scotched it in days, even before it started.”

“You are mistaken. He cannot have known. He learned of it only just now, when Dudley told the queen.”

She shakes her head impatiently. “Don’t you know yet that he knows everything?”

“How could he? The proposal was a letter from Howard to the queen, carried by Howard’s messenger under seal. How could Cecil have learned of it?”

She steps back out of my arms and her glance slides away from me. “He has spies,” she says vaguely. “Everywhere. He has spies who will see all of the Scots queen’s letters.”

“He can’t have done. If Cecil knew everything, from the first moment, then why did he not tell me of it? Why not tell the queen at once? Why leave it till now, and accuse me of being an accomplice in a plot?”