He held me for a few more seconds and then he coldly put me from him. I could almost feel the icy air of the quiet printing room rush between us. ‘This is not your mother. He is not a prisoner of faith,’ he said quietly. ‘He is not being tried by the Inquisition but by a queen whom you assure me is merciful and wise. There is no reason to love a man who has plotted and intrigued his way to treason. He would have put Lady Jane on the throne and beheaded the mistress that you say you love: Queen Mary. He is not an honourable man.’

I opened my mouth to argue but there was nothing I could say.

‘And you are all mixed up with him, with his train, with his treasonous plans, and with your feeling for him. I won’t call it love because if I thought for one moment it was anything more than a girl’s fancy I would go out now to your father and break our betrothal. But I tell you this. You have to leave the service of Robert Dudley, whatever future you have seen for him. You have to avoid John Dee and you have to surrender your gift. You can serve the queen until you are sixteen but you have to be my betrothed in word and in every act you take. And in eighteen months’ time from now, when you are sixteen, we will marry and you will leave court.’

‘Eighteen months?’ I said, very low.

He took my hand to his mouth and he bit the fat mons veneris at the root of my thumb, where the plumpness of the flesh tells hucksters and fairground fortune-tellers that the woman is ready for love.

‘Eighteen months,’ he said flatly. ‘Or I swear I will take another girl to be my wife and throw you away to whatever future the soothsayer, the traitor, and the queen make up for you.’

* * *

It was a cold winter, and not even Christmas brought any joy to the people. Every day brought the queen news of more petty complainings and uprisings in every county in the land. Every incident was small, hardly worth regarding, snowballs were thrown at the Spanish ambassador, a dead cat was slung into the aisle of a church, there were some insulting words scrawled on a wall, a woman prophesied doom in a churchyard—nothing to frighten the priests or the lords of the counties individually; but put together, they were unmistakeable signs of widespread unease.

The queen held Christmas at Whitehall and appointed a Lord of Misrule and demanded a merry court in the old ways, but it was no good. The missing places at the Christmas feast told their own story: Lady Elizabeth did not even visit her sister, but stayed at Ashridge, her house on the great north road, ideally placed to advance on London as soon as someone gave the word. Half a dozen of the queen’s council were unaccountably missing; the French ambassador was busier than any good Christian should be at Christmastide. It was clear that there was trouble brewing right up to the very throne, and the queen knew it, we all of us knew it.