‘I was clumsy,’ I confessed. ‘But Will, I spoke to a woman today and the things that she told me would have made you weep!’

‘Far worse in France,’ he said quickly. ‘Worse in Italy. You of all people should know, child, that it is worse in Spain.’

That checked me. ‘I came to England thinking that this was a country that would be more merciful. Surely the queen is not a woman to burn a priest’s wife.’

He dropped an arm over my shoulders. ‘Child, you are a fool indeed,’ he said gently. ‘The queen has no mother to advise her, no husband who loves her, and no child to distract her. She wants to do right and she is told by everyone around her that the best way to bring this country to heel is to burn a few nobodies who are destined for hell already. Her heart might ache for them but she will sacrifice them to save the rest, just as she would sacrifice herself for her own immortal soul. Your skill, my skill, is to make sure that it never occurs to her to sacrifice us.’

I turned a face to him which was as grave as he would have wished. ‘Will, I have trusted her. I would trust her with my life.’

‘You do rightly,’ he said in mock approbation. ‘You are a very true fool. It is only a fool who trusts a king.’

* * *

In July the court should have been on progress, travelling round the great houses of England, enjoying the hunting and the parties and the pleasures of the English summer, but still the queen said nothing about when we might leave. Our setting out had been delayed day after day waiting for the birth of the prince, and now, twelve weeks late, nobody truly believed that the prince would come.

Nobody said anything to the queen—that was the worst of it. Nobody asked her how she was feeling, whether she was ill, if she was bleeding or sick. She had lost a child which meant more to her than the world itself, and nobody asked her how she did, or if they could comfort her. She was surrounded by a wall of polite silence, but they smiled when she had gone by, and some of them laughed behind their hands and said that she was an old and foolish woman and that she had mistaken the drying-up of her courses for a pregnancy! and what a fool she was! and what a fool she had made of the king! and how he must hate her for making him the laughing-stock of Christendom!

She must have known how they spoke of her, and the bitter twist of her mouth showed her hurt; but she walked with her head high through a summertime court which was buzzing with malice and gossip, and she still said nothing. At the end of July, still without a public word from the queen, the midwives packed up their dozens of bandages, put away the embroidered white silk layette, packed away the bonnets, the little bootees, the petticoats and the swaddling bands and finally carried the magnificent wooden cradle from the birthing room. The servants took down the tapestries from the windows and the walls, the thick Turkish rugs from the floor, the straps and the rich bedding from the bed. Without any word of explanation from the doctors, from the midwives or from the queen herself, everyone realised that now there was no baby, now there was no pregnancy, and the matter was closed. The court moved in an almost silent procession to Oatlands Palace and took up residence so quietly that you would have thought that someone had died in hiding, of shame.