‘You’re to be released to Sir Henry Bedingfield,’ I said. ‘And to go with him to Woodstock Palace.’

There was no leap of hope in her face. ‘And what then?’

‘House arrest,’ I said.

‘I am not declared innocent? I am not received at court?’

‘You’re not on trial and you’re not executed,’ I pointed out. ‘And you’re away from the Tower. There are other prisoners still left here, in a worse state.’

‘They will bury me at Woodstock,’ she said. ‘This is a trick to get me away from the city so I can be forgotten. They will poison me when I am out of sight and bury me far from court.’

‘If the queen wanted you dead she could have sent for a swordsman,’ I said. ‘This is your freedom, or at least a part-freedom. I should have thought you would be glad.’

Elizabeth’s face was dull. ‘D’you know what my mother did to her mother?’ she asked in a whisper. ‘She sent her to a house in the country, and then to another—a smaller meaner place, and then to another, even worse—until the poor woman was in a damp ruin at the end of the world and she died ill, without a physician, starving, with no money to buy food, and crying for her daughter who was not allowed to come to her. Queen Katherine died in poverty and hardship while her daughter was a servant in my nursery, waiting on me. Don’t you think that daughter remembers that? Isn’t that what will happen to me? Don’t you see this is Mary’s revenge? Don’t you see the absolute precision of it?’

‘You’re young,’ I said. ‘Anything could happen.’

‘You know I get ill, you know that I never sleep. You know that I have lived my life on the edge of a knife ever since they accused me of bastardy when I was just two years old. I can’t survive neglect. I can’t survive poison, I can’t survive the assassin’s knife in the night. I don’t think I can survive loneliness and fear for much longer.’

‘But Lady Elizabeth,’ I pleaded with her. ‘You said to me, every moment you have is a moment you have won. When you leave here, you have won yourself another moment.’

‘When I leave here I go to a secret and shameful death,’ she said flatly. She turned from the window and went to her bed and knelt before it, putting her face in her hands against the embroidered coverlet. ‘If they killed me here at least I should have a name as a martyred princess, I would be remembered as another greater Jane. But they do not even have the courage to send me to the scaffold. They will come at me in secret and I will die in hiding.’

* * *

I knew I could not leave the Tower without trying to see Lord Robert. He was in the same quarters, tucked opposite the tower, with his family crest carved by his father and his brother in the mantelpiece. I thought it a melancholy room for him to live in, overlooking the green where they had been executed, his death place.