I got to my feet and staggered back against the stone wall.

‘Are you sick, fool?’ came the cool voice of one of Lord Howard’s men. His Lordship glanced over indifferently.

I gulped down the lump that was in my throat. ‘May I tell Lady Elizabeth about Lady Jane?’ I asked him. ‘She will want to know.’

‘You can tell her,’ he said. ‘And I should think she would want to know. Everyone will know within a few days. Jane and the Dudleys died on the block before a crowd of hundreds. It’s public business.’

‘The charge?’ I asked, although I knew the answer.

‘Treason,’ he said flatly. ‘Tell her that. Treason. And pretending to the throne.’

Without another word being said, everyone turned to the litter where Lady Elizabeth, her hand outstretched to Mrs Ashley, the other holding to the side of the door, was laboriously descending.

‘So die all traitors,’ said her cousin, looking at the white-faced girl, his own kin, who had been a friend to every man who now swung on the gibbet. ‘So die all traitors.’

‘Amen,’ said a voice from the back of the crowd.

* * *

I waited till she had dined before I found my way to her side. She was dipping her fingers in the basin of water held out to her by the yeoman of the ewery and then holding them for a pageboy to pat dry.

‘The letter?’ she asked me, without turning her head.

‘It’ll be public news within the day,’ I said. ‘I am sorry to tell you, Lady Elizabeth, that your cousin Lady Jane Grey has been executed and her husband . . . and Lord Robert Dudley too.’

The hands she held out to the pageboy were perfectly steady, but I could see her eyes darken. ‘She has done it then,’ she observed quietly. ‘The queen. She has found the courage to execute her own kin, her own cousin, a young woman she knew from childhood.’ She looked at me, her hands as steady as the pageboy’s who patted at her fingers with the monogrammed linen. ‘The queen has found the power of the axe. No-one will be able to sleep. Thank God I am innocent of any wrongdoing.’

I nodded but I hardly heard the words. I was thinking of Lord Robert going out to his death with his dark head held high.

She took her hands from the towel and turned from the table. ‘I am very tired,’ she said to her cousin. ‘Too tired to travel any further today. I have to rest.’

‘Lady Elizabeth, we have to go on,’ he said.

She shook her head in absolute refusal. ‘I cannot,’ she said simply. ‘I will rest now and we will leave early tomorrow.’

‘As long as it is early,’ he conceded. ‘At dawn, Your Ladyship.’

She gave him a smile that went no further than her lips. ‘Of course,’ she said.

* * *

However she prolonged the journey it had to end, and ten days after we had first set off we arrived at the house of a private gentleman in Highgate, late in the evening.