I waited.

She turned to me as if I had more sense than her greyhound, as if I could advise her. ‘Hannah, I am less than a man and less than a woman. I cannot rule as a man, and I cannot give the country the heir that it has a right to desire. I am a half-prince. Neither queen nor king.’

‘Surely, the country only needs a ruler it can respect,’ I said tentatively. ‘And it needs years of peace. I am new-come to this land but even I can see that men don’t know what is right and wrong any more. The church has changed and changed again within their lifetimes and they have had to change and change with it. And there is much poverty in the city, and hunger in the country. Can’t you just wait? Can’t you just feed the poor and restore the lands to the landless, set men back to work and get the beggars and the thieves off the roads? Bring back the beauty to the church and give the monasteries back their lands?’

‘And when I have done that?’ Queen Mary asked, a strange shaking intensity in her voice. ‘What then? When the country is safe inside the church again, when everyone is well fed, when the barns are full and the monasteries and nunneries are prosperous? When the priests are pure in their living and the Bible is read to the people as it should be? When the Mass is celebrated in every village, and the matins bells ring out over all the fields every morning as they should do, as they always have done? What then?’

‘Then you will have done the task that God called you to, won’t you? . . .’ I stammered.

She shook her head. ‘I will tell you, what then. Then illness or accident befalls me and I die childless. And the bastard of Anne Boleyn and the lute player Mark Smeaton steps up to claim the throne: Elizabeth. And the moment she is on the throne she throws off her mask and shows herself for what she is.’

I could hardly recognise the hiss of her voice, the hatred in her face. ‘Why, what is she? What has she done to upset you so?’

‘She has betrayed me,’ she said flatly. ‘When I was fighting for our inheritance, hers as well as mine, she was writing to the man who was marching against me. I know that now. While I was fighting for her as well as for myself she was making an agreement with him for when I was dead. She would have signed it on my execution block.

‘When I took her into London at my side they cheered the Protestant princess, and she smiled at the cheers. When I sent her teachers and scholars to explain to her the errors of her faith she smiled at them, her mother’s sly smile, and told them that now she understood, now she would receive the blessing of Mass.