‘Will he speak of any others, doing this with him?’ I breathed.

‘If they charge him with heresy you should expect him to sing like a little blinded thrush,’ she said, turning to me and smiling radiantly, as if it were not her life at stake as well as mine. ‘They’ll rack him, you know. No-one can stand that pain. He will be bound to talk.’

‘Heresy?’

‘So I’m told.’

She tossed her reins to her groom and walked towards the palace, leaning on my shoulder.

‘They’ll burn him?’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘Princess, what shall we do?’

She dropped her arm around my shoulder and gripped it hard, as if she were holding me to my senses. I could feel that her hand did not tremble for a moment. ‘We will wait. And hope to survive this. Same as always, Hannah. Wait, and hope to survive.’

‘You will survive,’ I said with sudden bitterness.

Elizabeth turned her bright face to me, her smile merry but her eyes were like chips of coal. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I have done so, thus far.’

* * *

In mid-June the queen, still pregnant, broke with convention to release herself from the confinement chamber. The physicians could not say that she would be any worse for being outside, and they thought walking in the air might give her an appetite for her meals. They were afraid that she was not eating enough to keep herself and her baby alive. In the cool of the morning or in the shadowy evening she would stroll slowly in her private garden attended only by her ladies and the members of her household. She was changing before my eyes from the deliciously infatuated woman that Prince Philip of Spain had wedded and bedded, and loved into joy, back to the anxious prematurely aged woman that I had first met. Her new confidence in love and happiness was draining away from her, with the pink of her cheeks and the blue of her eyes, and I could see her drawn back to the loneliness and fearfulness of her childhood, almost like an invalid slipping towards death.

‘Your Grace.’ I dropped to one knee as I met her in the privy garden one day. She had been looking at the fast flow of the river past the boat pier, looking, and yet not seeing. A brood of ducklings was playing in the current, their mother watchful nearby, surveying the little bundles of fluff as they paddled and bobbed. Even the ducks on the Thames had young; but England’s cradle, with that hopeful poem at the bed-head, was still empty.

She turned an unseeing dark gaze to me. ‘Oh, Hannah.’

‘Are you well, Your Grace?’

She tried to smile at me but I saw her lips twist down.

‘No, Hannah, my child. I am not very well.’

‘Are you in pain?’

She shook her head. ‘I should be glad of pain, of labour pains. No, Hannah. I feel nothing, not in my body, not in my heart.’