I smiled. ‘I did.’

‘What was it like?’

I giggled, I couldn’t help it. ‘Lady Elizabeth, I was so taken with Lord Robert that I hardly noticed the angel.’

She sat up, quite forgetting her pose of illness, and laughed with me. ‘He is very . . . he is so . . . he is indeed a man you look at.’

‘And I only realised it was an angel afterwards,’ I said to excuse myself. ‘At the time I was just overwhelmed by the three of them, Mr Dee, Lord Robert, and the third.’

‘And do your visions come to pass?’ she asked keenly. ‘You scried for Mr Dee, didn’t you?’

I hesitated with a sense of the ground opening into a chasm under my feet. ‘Who says so?’ I asked cautiously.

She smiled at me, a flash of small white teeth as if she were a bright fox. ‘Never mind what I know. I am asking what you know.’

‘Some things that I see have come to pass,’ I said, honestly enough. ‘But sometimes the very things I need to know, the most important things in the world, I cannot tell. Then it is a useless gift. If it had warned me—just once—’

‘What warning?’ she asked.

‘The death of my mother,’ I said. I would have bitten back the words as soon as they were spoken. I did not want to tell my past to this sharp-minded princess.

I glanced at her face but she was looking at me with intense sympathy. ‘I did not know,’ she said gently. ‘Did she die in Spain? You came from Spain, did you not?’

‘In Spain,’ I said. ‘Of the plague.’ I felt a sharp twist of pain in my belly at lying about my mother, but I did not dare to think of the fires of the Inquisition with this young woman watching me. It was as if she could have seen the flicker of their reflected flames in my eyes.

‘I am sorry,’ she said, very low. ‘It is hard for a young woman to grow up without a mother.’

I knew she was thinking of herself for a moment, and of the mother who had died on the scaffold with the names of witch, adulteress and whore. She put away the thought. ‘But what made you come to England?’

‘We have kin here. And my father had arranged a marriage for me. We wanted to start again.’

She smiled at my breeches. ‘Does your betrothed know that he will be getting a girl who is half-boy?’

I made a little pout. ‘He does not like me at court, he does not like me in livery, and he does not like me in breeches.’

‘But do you like him?’

‘Well enough as a cousin. Not enough for a husband.’

‘And do you have any choice in the matter?’

‘Not much,’ I said shortly.

She nodded. ‘It’s always the same for all women,’ she said, a hint of resentment in her voice. ‘The only people who can choose their lives are those in breeches. You do right to wear them.’