I drew a little closer. ‘Perhaps these are the fancies that come before birth,’ I said soothingly. ‘Like when they say women have a craving for eating raw fruit or coal.’

She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ She held out her hands to me, as patient as a sick child. ‘Can’t you see, Hannah? With your gift? Can you see, and tell me the truth?’

Almost unwillingly I took her hands and at her touch I felt a rush of despair as dark and as cold as if I had fallen into the river which flowed beneath the pier. She saw the shock in my face, and read it rightly at once.

‘He’s gone, hasn’t he?’ she whispered. ‘I have somehow lost him.’

‘I wouldn’t know, Your Grace,’ I stumbled. ‘I’m no physician, I wouldn’t have the skill to judge . . .’

She shook her head, the bright sunlight glinting on the rich embroidery of her hood, on the gold hoops in her ears, all this worldly wealth encasing heartbreak. ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I had a son in my belly and now he is gone. I feel an emptiness where I used to feel a life.’

I still had hold of her icy hands, I found I was chafing them, as people will chafe the hands of a corpse.

‘Oh, Your Grace!’ I cried out. ‘There can be another child. Where one has been made you can make another. You had a child and lost him, hundreds of women do that, and go on to have another child. You can do that too.’

She did not even seem to hear me, she let her hands lie in mine and she looked towards the river as if she would want it to wash her away.

‘Your Grace?’ I whispered, very quietly. ‘Queen Mary? Dearest Mary?’

When she turned her face to me her eyes were filled with tears. ‘It’s all wrong,’ she said, and her voice was low and utterly desolate. ‘It has been going wrong since Elizabeth’s mother took my father from us and broke my mother’s heart, and nothing can put it right again. It’s been going wrong since Elizabeth’s mother won my father to sin and led him from his faith so that he lived and died in torment. It’s all wrong, Hannah, and I cannot put it right though I have tried and tried. It is too much for me. There is too much sadness and sin and loss in this story for me to put right. It is beyond me. And now Elizabeth has taken my husband from me, my husband who was the greatest joy of my life—the only joy of my life—the only man who ever loved me, the only person I have ever loved since I lost my mother. She has taken him from me. And now my son has gone from me too.’

Her darkness flowed through me like a draught of the deepest despair. I gripped her hands as if she were a drowning woman, swept away in a night flood.