‘Amen,’ I said promptly, as if accurate observation now would save me. ‘Dear God, amen.’

I knew I was lost. I could not speak, let alone defend myself. I thought what a fool of a girl I had been not to go with Daniel when he would have saved me. What an arrogant child I had been to think that I could weave my way through these plots and not attract notice. Me, with olive skin and dark eyes, and a name like Hannah?

We came to a panelled door, monstrous with hammered nails. He tapped on it, opened it at a call from within, and walked in, arms tight around me as if we were mismatched lovers.

The bishop was sitting at a table facing the door; his clerk had his back to the door. A chair was set at a distance facing both table and bishop. The gaoler dumped me roughly into it and stood back, closed the door and set himself before it.

‘Name?’ the bishop asked wearily.

‘Hannah Verde,’ the gaoler answered, while I searched for my voice and found it was lost in terror.

‘Age?’

He reached forward and prodded my shoulder.

‘Seventeen,’ I whispered.

‘What?’

‘Seventeen,’ I said, a little louder. I had forgotten the meticulous record-keeping of the Inquisition, the bureaucracy of terror. First they would take my name, my age, my address, my occupation, the name of my father and my mother, their address, their occupations, the names of my grandparents and their address and occupations, and then, and only then, when they had everything named and labelled, they would torture me until I spilled out everything I knew, everything I could imagine, and everything that I thought they might want to know.

‘Occupation?’

‘Fool to the queen,’ I said.

There was a splashing noise in the room, a childish damp warmth in my breeches, and a shameful stable smell. I had pissed myself for fear. I bowed my head, mortification overlaying my terror.

The clerk raised his head as if alerted by the warm sharp smell. He turned and observed me. ‘Oh, I can vouch for this girl,’ he said as if it were a matter of very little interest.

It was John Dee.

I was beyond recognising him, beyond wondering how he came to be the bishop’s clerk having been the bishop’s prisoner. I just met his neutral look with the blank eyes of a girl too frightened to think for herself.

‘Can you?’ asked the bishop doubtfully.

John Dee nodded. ‘She is a holy fool,’ he said. ‘She once saw an angel in Fleet Street.’

‘That must be heretical,’ the bishop maintained.

John Dee considered it for a moment, as if it were not a matter of life and death to me. ‘No, a true vision I think, and Queen Mary thinks the same. She will not be best pleased when she discovers we have arrested her fool.’

That gave the bishop pause. I could see him hesitate. ‘The queen’s orders to me are to root out heresy wherever I find it, in her household, in the streets, and to show no favour. The girl was arrested with a royal warrant.’