‘What am I to tell the queen?’ I asked her at the end of a long week. The physicians had declared her on the way to health once more, they could take a message back to court for me. If Elizabeth continued to mend she could have ridden in triumph to court for Christmas, if only she would confess.

‘You can tell her a riddle,’ Elizabeth said with feeble malice. She was seated in a chair, a pillow thrust behind her back to support her, a blanket wrapped around a hot brick under her cold feet.

I waited.

‘You are a rhyming fool, are you not?’

‘No, Princess,’ I said quietly. ‘As you know. I have no fooling skills.’

‘Then I will teach you a rhyme,’ she said savagely. ‘You can write it to the queen if you wish. You can engrave it on every damned window in this hellhole if you wish.’ She smiled grimly at me. ‘It goes like this:

Much suspected of me

Nothing proved can be

Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner.

Don’t you think that is neat?’

I bowed and went to write my letter to the queen.

WINTER 1554–55

We waited, Christmas came and went and there was no joy for me either as I was ordered to stay with Elizabeth until she begged for forgiveness. It was freezing cold at Woodstock, there was not a window that did not direct a draught into the room, there was not a fire that did not smoke. The linen on the beds was always damp, the very floorboards underfoot were wet to the touch. It was a malevolent house in winter. I had been in good health when I arrived, and yet even I could feel myself growing weak from the relentless cold and the darkness, late dawns and early twilights. For Elizabeth, already exhausted by her ordeal in the Tower, always quick to go from anxiety to illness, the house was a killer.

She was too ill to take any pleasure in the festivities, and they were scanty and mean. She was too weak to do more than look out of the window at the mummers who came to the door. She raised her hand to wave at them, Elizabeth would never fail an audience, but after they had gone she sank back on the day bed and lay still. Kat Ashley threw another log on the fire and it hissed as the frost in the grain of the wood started to melt and it smoked most miserably.

I wrote to my father to wish him a merry Christmastide and to tell him that I missed him and hoped to see him soon. I enclosed a note for Daniel in which I sent him my best wishes. A few weeks later, in the cold snows of January when the draughty palace of Woodstock was a nightmare of coldness and darkness from grey dawn to early dusk, I had a letter from each of them. My father’s was brief and affectionate, saying that business was good in Calais, and would I please go to check on the shop in London when I was next in the city. Then I opened my letter from Daniel.