‘I must be free of this hatred,’ she said quietly. ‘I must be free of the pain that her mother brought me. I must disown her.’

‘Your Grace . . .’ I said again, more gently.

She turned back to me.

‘She will come after me if I die without heir,’ she said flatly. ‘That lying whore. Anything I achieve will be overturned by her, will be spoiled by her. Everything in my life has always been despoiled by her. I was England’s only princess and the great joy of my mother’s heart. A moment, an eyelid blink, and I was serving in Elizabeth’s nursery as her maid, and my mother was deserted and then dead. Elizabeth, the whore’s daughter, is corruption itself. I have to have a child to put between her and the throne. It is the greatest duty I owe to this country, to my mother and to myself.’

‘You will have to marry Philip of Spain?’

She nodded. ‘He, as well as any other,’ she said. ‘I can make a treaty with him that will hold. He knows, his father knows, what this country is like. I can be queen and wife with a man like him. He has his own land, his own fortune, he does not need little England. And then I can be queen of my own country and wife to him, and a mother.’

There was something in the way she said ‘mother’ that alerted me. I had felt her touch on my head, I had seen her with the children that tumbled out from dirty cottages.

‘Why, you long for a child for yourself,’ I exclaimed.

I saw the need in her eyes and then she turned away from me to the window and the view of the cold river again. ‘Oh yes,’ she said quietly to the cold garden outside. ‘I have longed for a child of my own for twenty years. That was why I loved my poor brother so much. In the hunger of my heart I even loved Elizabeth when she was a baby. Perhaps God in his goodness will give me a son of my own now.’ She looked at me. ‘You have the Sight. Will I have a child, Hannah? Will I have a child of my own, to hold in my arms and to love? A child who will grow and inherit my throne and make England a great country?’

I waited for a moment, in case anything came to me. All I had was a sense of great despair and hopelessness, nothing more. I dropped my gaze to the floor and I knelt before her. ‘I am sorry, Your Grace,’ I said. ‘The Sight cannot be commanded. I can’t tell you the answer to that question, nor any other. My vision comes and goes as it wishes. I cannot say if you will have a child.’

‘Then I will predict for you,’ she said grimly. ‘I will tell you this. I will marry this Philip of Spain without love, without desire, but with a very true sense that it is what this country needs. He will bring us the wealth and the power of Spain, he will make this country a part of the empire, which we need so much. He will help me restore this country to the discipline of the true church, and he will give me a child to be a godly Christian heir to keep this country in the right ways.’ She paused. ‘You should say Amen,’ she prompted me.