I got back to Hampton Court in time for breakfast. I ran up the deserted garden from the river and entered the palace by the stable door. Anyone seeing me would have thought that I had been riding in the early morning, as I so often did.

‘Good day,’ one of the pages said and I turned on him the pleasant smile of the habitual liar.

‘Good day,’ I replied.

‘And how is the queen this morning?’

‘Merry indeed.’

* * *

Like the curtains at the windows of her confinement chamber, shutting out the summer sun, the queen grew paler and faded through every day of the tenth month of her waiting. In contrast, as Elizabeth’s confidence grew her very presence, her hair, her skin, seemed to shine more brightly. When she swept into the confinement chamber, taking a stool to talk lightly, sing to her lute, or stitch incredibly fine baby clothes, the queen seemed to shrink into invisibility. The girl was a radiant sparkling beauty, even as she sat over her sewing and demurely bowed her flaming head. Beside her, hand on her belly, always waiting in case the child should move, Mary was becoming little more than a shadow. As the days wore on, through the long long month of June, she became like a shadow waiting for the birth of a shadow. She seemed hardly to be there at all, her baby seemed hardly to be there at all. They were both melting away.

The king was a driven man. Everything directed him towards a steady fidelity to his wife: her love for him, her vulnerable condition, the need to appease the English nobility and keep the council favourably disposed towards Spanish policy as the country sneered at the sterile Spanish king. He knew this, he was a brilliant politician and diplomat; but he could not help himself. Where Elizabeth walked, there he followed. When she rode, he called for his horse and galloped after her. When she danced, he watched her and called for them to play the music again. When she studied, he loaned her books and corrected her pronunciation like a disinterested schoolmaster, while all the time his eyes were on her lips, on the neck of her gown, on her hands clasped lightly in her lap.

‘Princess, this is a dangerous game,’ I warned her.

‘Hannah, this is my life,’ she said simply. ‘With the king on my side I need fear nothing. And if he were to be free to marry, then I could look to no better match.’

‘Your sister’s husband? While she is confined with his child?’ I demanded, scandalised.

Her downcast eyes were slits of jet. ‘I might think, as she did, that an alliance between Spain and England would dominate all of Christendom,’ she said sweetly.

‘Yes, the queen thought that, and yet all that has happened is that she has brought the heresy laws on the heads of her subjects,’ I said tartly. ‘And brought herself to solitude in a darkened room with her heart breaking and her sister outside in the sunshine flirting with her husband.’