‘People like to think for themselves . . .’ I suggested.

She rounded on me. ‘No, they don’t. They like to follow a man who is prepared to think for them. And now they think they have found him. They have found Thomas Wyatt. Oh yes, I know of him. The son of Anne Boleyn’s lover, whose side d’you think he is on? They have men like Robert Dudley, waiting on his chance in the Tower, and they have a princess like Elizabeth: a foolish girl, too young to know her own mind, too vain to take care, and too greedy to wait, as I had to wait, as I had to wait honourably, for all those long testing years. I waited in a wilderness, Hannah. But she will not wait at all.’

‘You need not fear Robert Dudley,’ I said quickly. ‘D’you not remember that he declared for you? Against his own father? But who is this Wyatt?’

She walked to the wall and back to the window again. ‘He has sworn he will be faithful to me but deny me my husband,’ she said. ‘As if such a thing could be done! He says he will pull me from the throne, and then put me back again.’

‘Does he have many on his side?’

‘Half of Kent,’ she whispered. ‘And that sly devil Edward Courtenay as king in waiting, if I know him, and Elizabeth hoping to be his queen. And there will be money coming from somewhere to pay him for his crime, I don’t doubt.’

‘Money?’

Her voice was bitter. ‘Francs. The enemies of England are always paid in francs.’

‘Can’t you arrest him?’

‘When I find him, I can,’ she said. ‘He’s a traitor ten times over. But I don’t know where he is nor when he plans to make his move.’ She walked to the window and looked out, as if she would see beyond the garden at the foot of the palace walls, over the silver Thames, cold in the winter sunlight, all the way to Kent and the men who kept their plans hidden.

I was struck by the contrast between our hopes on the road to London and how it was, now that she was queen crowned. ‘D’you know, I thought when we rode into London that all your struggles would be over.’

The look she turned to me was haunted, her eyes shadowed with brown, her skin as thick as candle-wax. She looked years older than she had done that day when we had ridden in to cheering crowds at the head of a cheering army. ‘I thought so too,’ she said. ‘I thought that my unhappiness was over. The fear that I felt all through my childhood: the nightmares at night, and the terrible waking every day to find that they were true. I thought that if I was proclaimed queen and crowned queen then I would feel safe. But now it is worse than before. Every day I hear of another plot against me, every day I see someone look askance when I go to Mass, every day I hear someone admire Lady Elizabeth’s learning or her dignity or her grace. Every day I know that another man has whispered with the French ambassador, spread a little gossip, told a little lie, suggested that I would throw my kingdom into the lap of Spain; as if I had not spent my life, my whole life, waiting for the throne! As if my mother did not sacrifice herself, refuse any agreement with the king so that she might keep me as the heir! She died without me at her side, without a kind word from him, in a cold damp ruin, far away from her friends, so that I might one day be queen. As though I would throw away her inheritance for a mere fancy for a portrait! Are they mad that they think I might so forget myself?