“I would trust you,” I say simply. “And I would trust no one else. You would guard him for me, wouldn’t you? You would care for my boy? You would not let them corrupt him? You would not let them turn him against me? You would keep him safe?”

He slips from his stool and kneels on the carpet that they have laid on the riverbank under my chair. “I would lay down my life to keep him safe,” he says. “I would devote my life to him.”

I give him my hand. This is the last card in the pack that I have to play to get myself back to Scotland and ensure at the same time that my son is safe. “Can you persuade Cecil that James shall come to you?” I ask. “Propose it to him as your own idea?”

He is so in love with me that he does not stop to think that he should ask his wife first, or that he should beware when an enemy of his country asks for a special favor.

“Yes,” he says. “Why would he not agree? He wants a settlement, we all do. And I would be honored to care for your son. It would be as if... to guard him for you would be like...” He cannot say it. I know he is thinking that to raise my son would be as if we had married and had a child together. I cannot encourage him to speak like this; I have to keep him carefully placed: in his marriage, in the esteem of his peers, in the trust of his queen, in his position in England. He is of no use to me if they think of him as disloyal. If they think too badly of him they will take me from him and not trust him with my son.

“Don’t say it,” I whisper passionately, and it silences him at once. “Some things must never be said between us. It is a matter of honor.”

This checks him, as I knew it would. “It is a matter of honor to us both,” I say to make sure. “I cannot bear that men should accuse you of taking advantage of your position as my guardian. Just think how dreadful it would be if people should say that you had me at your mercy and dishonored me in your thoughts.”

He almost chokes. “I would never! I am not like that!”

“I know. But it is what people would say. People have said terrible things about me, for all of my life. They might accuse me of trying to seduce you, so that I could escape.”

“No one could think such a thing!”

“You know that is what they think already. There is nothing that Elizabeth’s spies will not say against me. They say the worst things about me. They would not understand what I feel... for you.”