She waited, as if hoping for the miracle of a reply.

‘And You know, as I do, that Elizabeth is guilty indeed,’ she said, very low. ‘But how can I send my cousin and my sister to the scaffold?’

Jane Dormer shot me a look and the two of us moved our stools so as to block the view and the hearing of the other ladies in waiting. The queen on her knees should not be overheard. She was consulting the only advisor she truly trusted. She was bringing to the naked stabbed feet of her God the choices she had to make.

The council looked for evidence of Elizabeth’s conspiracy with the rebels and they found enough to hang her a dozen times over. She had met with both Thomas Wyatt and with Sir William Pickering, even as the rebellion had been launched. On my own account, I knew that she had taken a message from me with all the ease of a practised conspirator. There was no doubt in my mind, there was no doubt in the queen’s mind, that if the rebellion had succeeded—as it would have done but for the folly of Edward Courtenay—that it would now be Queen Elizabeth sitting at the head of the council and wondering whether she should sign the death warrant for her half-sister and her cousin. There was not a doubt in my mind that Queen Elizabeth too would spend hours on her knees. But Elizabeth would sign.

A guard tapped on the door, and looked into the quiet room.

‘What is it?’ Jane Dormer asked very softly.

‘Message for the fool, at the side gate,’ the young man said.

I nodded and crept from the room, crossed the great presence chamber where there was a flurry of interest in the small crowd as I opened the door from the queen’s private apartments, and came out. They were all petitioners, up from the country: from Wales and from Devon and from Kent, the places which had risen against the queen. They would be asking for mercy now, mercy from a queen that they would have destroyed. I saw their hopeful faces as the door opened for me, and did not wonder that she spent hours on her knees, trying to discover the will of God. The queen had been merciful to those who had taken the throne from her once; was she now to show mercy again? And what about the next time, and the time after that?

I did not have to show these traitors any courtly politeness. I scowled at them and elbowed my way through. I felt absolute uncompromising hatred of them, that they should have set themselves up to destroy the queen not once, but twice, and now came to court with their caps twisted in their hands and their heads bowed down to ask for the chance to go home and plot against her again.

I pushed past them and down the twisting stone stair to the gate. I found I was hoping that Daniel would be there, and so I was disappointed when I saw a pageboy, a lad I did not know, in homespun, wearing no livery and bearing no badge.