Anthony Babington, Bess’s sweetest young page, comes to me as I am getting into my saddle and whispers to me the code word that tells me I can trust him: “Sunflower.”

It is the impresa of my girlhood, my chosen badge, the sunflower, which turns to light and warmth and hope. “Send a message to them if you can, to tell them where I am going,” I whisper to him, hardly looking at him, as he tightens the girth on my horse and straightens the reins for me. “I don’t know where they are taking me. South, somewhere.”

His honest boy’s face beams up at me. Bless the child. His brown eyes are filled with adoration. “But I know,” he says joyfully. “I heard my lord talking. Coventry. I will tell them.”

“But you take care,” I warn him. “Take no risks. You are too young to put your head in a noose.”

He flushes. “I am eight,” he says stoutly, as if it were a great age. “And I have been in service since I was six.”

“You are a young man of courage,” I say to him, and see his boyish flush.

All the way along the road, as we ride as fast as we dare in the gray light of a wintry dawn, I see the men looking to the left and to the right, listening for the sound of drums and pipes, fearfully alert for the great army of the men of the North. They fear that they will round a bend in the road and find a wall of men, waiting to take me. They fear that even now the horsemen are closing on us, coming up on us from the rear, gaining on us however fast we ride. They know that coming down the road behind us are men who have sworn to restore the true religion and the true queen, an army on the march under the very banner of Christ, in His very name, riding to revenge sacrilege against their church, treason against their queen, sin against their country’s history. My captors know they are in the wrong, know they are outnumbered and defeated before they start. They march at speed, almost at a run, their heads down and their faces gray; they are men in abject terror.

Agnes and Mary and I ride three abreast in silence, a secret smile passing between us from time to time, hard put not to laugh out loud. I look ahead and there is poor Shrewsbury, his face stony with worry, his eyes raking the horizon. Beside him rides my lord Hastings, his face grim, a sword at his side, an assassin’s dagger hidden in his coat. He will not enjoy the experience of running before a greater force; he will hate the stink of panic that his men give off as they hurry along the road.