She turned away and brushed her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Good God, I am weak as a child losing a nursemaid!’

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. I had never seen her so low. I had seen her swollen and sick on her bed and yet even then I had seen her eyes gleam with bright cunning. ‘What is it?’

‘I am frozen to my very bones with fear,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I tell you, Hannah, if fear is cold and darkness I am living in the wastes of the Russias. No-one sees me but to interrogate me, no-one touches me but to position me for questioning. No-one smiles at me, they stare as if they would see my heart. My only friends in the whole world have been exiled, imprisoned or beheaded. I am only twenty years old and I am utterly alone. I am only a young woman and yet I have no-one’s love and care. No-one comes near me but Kat and you, and now you tell me you are leaving.’

‘I have to see my father,’ I said. ‘But I’ll come back as soon as he is well.’

The face she turned to me was not that of the defiant princess, the hated Protestant enemy at this passionately Catholic court. The face she turned to me was that of a young woman, alone with no mother or father, and no friends. A young woman trying to find the courage to face a death that must come soon. ‘You will come back to me, Hannah? I have become accustomed to you. And I have no-one about me but you and Kat. I ask it of you as a friend, not a princess. You will come back?’

‘Yes,’ I promised. I took her hand. She had not exaggerated about feeling cold, she was as icy as if she were dead already. ‘I swear I will come back.’

Her clammy fingers returned my grip. ‘You will think me a coward, perhaps,’ she said. ‘But I swear to you, Hannah, that I cannot keep up my courage without a friendly face by me. And I think soon I shall need all the courage I can summon. Come back to me, please. Come back quick.’

* * *

My father’s shop had the shutters up though it was only early in the afternoon. I quickened my step as I turned down the street and I felt for the first time a fear clutch at my heart at the thought that he was a mortal man, just like Robert Dudley, and that none of us could say how long we would live.

Daniel was putting the bolt on the last shutter and he turned around at the rapid sound of my footsteps.

‘Good,’ he said shortly. ‘Come inside.’

I put my hand on his arm. ‘Daniel, is he very ill?’

He covered my hand briefly with his own. ‘Come inside.’

I went into the shop. The counter was bare of books, the printing room quiet. I went up the rickety stairs at the rear of the shop and looked towards the little truckle bed in the corner of the room, fearing that I would see him there, too ill to stand.