I waited in case she would say more.

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, no matter,’ she said bluntly. ‘I confessed to nothing, I am innocent of everything. I am the heir and there is nothing they can do about it unless they find some way to murder me. I won’t stand trial, I won’t marry, and I won’t leave the country. I’ll just wait.’

I said nothing. Both of us were thinking of the queen’s approaching confinement. A healthy baby boy would mean that Elizabeth had waited for nothing. She would do better to marry now while she had the prestige of being heir, or she would end up like her sister: an elderly bride, or worse, a spinster aunt.

‘I’d give a lot to know how long I had to wait,’ she said frankly.

I bowed again.

‘Oh, go away,’ she said impatiently. ‘If I had known you were bringing me to court for a bedtime lecture from my sister I wouldn’t ever have come.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘But there was a moment when we both thought that court would be better for you than that freezing barn at Woodstock.’

‘It wasn’t so bad,’ Elizabeth said sulkily.

‘Princess, it was worse than a pig’s hovel.’

She giggled at that, a true girl’s giggle. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘And being scolded by Mary is not as bad as being overwatched by that drudge Bedingfield. Yes, I suppose it is better here. It is only . . .’ She broke off, and then rose to her feet and pushed the smouldering log with the toe of her slipper. ‘I would give a lot to know how long I have to wait,’ she repeated.

* * *

I visited my father’s shop as he had asked me to do in his Christmas letter, to ensure that all was well there. It was a desolate place now; a tile had come from the roof in the winter storms and there was a damp stain down the lime-washed wall of my old bedroom. The printing press was shrouded in a dust sheet and stood beneath it like a hidden dragon, waiting to come out and roar words. But which ones would be safe in this new England where even the Bible was being taken back from the parish churches so that people could only hear from the priest and not read for themselves? If the very word of God was forbidden, then what books could be allowed? I looked along my father’s long shelves of books and pamphlets; half of them would now be called heresy, and it was a crime to store them, as we were doing here.

I felt a sense of great weariness and fear. For our own safety I should either spend a day here and burn my father’s books, or never come back here again. While they had cords of wood and torches stacked in great stores at Smithfield, a girl with a past like mine should not be in a room of books such as these. But these were our fortune, my father had amassed them over his years in Spain, collected them during his time in England. They were the fruit of hundreds of years of study by learned men and I was not merely their owner, I was their custodian. I would be a poor guardian if I burned them to save my own skin.