A little unwilling giggle escaped me. ‘They said I was a fool, and could not be held responsible.’

His crack of laughter made all the neighbouring tables turn their heads and smile. ‘You! Well that’s good news for me. I shall know what to plead. And that’s what they truly said?’

‘Yes. But, Will, it is no laughing matter. There were two women in there, one half-dead from the rack and the other with her fingernails torn out of her hands. The whole house was packed from cellar to attic with men waiting their trial.’

His face grew sombre. ‘Hush, child, there is nothing you can do about it now. You did what you could, and speaking out is perhaps what led you there.’

‘Will, I was most afraid,’ I said quietly.

His warm big hand took my cold fingers in a gentle grasp. ‘Child, we are all of us afraid. Better times coming, eh?’

‘When will they come?’ I whispered.

He shook his head without saying anything; but I knew that he was thinking of Elizabeth and when her reign might begin. And if Will Somers was thinking of Elizabeth with hope, then the queen had lost the love of a man who had been a true friend indeed.

* * *

I counted the days, waiting for Daniel’s arrival. Before I had gone downriver to Greenwich, I had put the letter in the hand of a shipmaster who was sailing to Calais that morning. I recited to myself his progress. ‘Say: it takes a day to Calais, then say a day to find the house, then say Daniel understands, and leaves at once, he should be with me inside a week.’

I decided that if I heard nothing from him within seven days that I would go to the shop, pack the most precious books and manuscripts in as large a box as I could manage, and take a passage to Calais on my own.

In the meantime I had to wait. I attended Mass in the queen’s train, I read the Bible to her in Spanish in her room every day after dinner, I prayed with her at her bedtime. I watched her unhappiness turn to a solid-seated misery, a state that I thought she would live and die in. She was in despair, I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own day. It was clear that nothing could be done to lift the shadow which was on her; and so I, and everyone else, said and did nothing.

One morning, as we were coming out of Mass, the queen leading the way, her ladies behind her, one of the queen’s newest maids in waiting fell into step beside me. I was watching the queen. She was walking slowly, her head drooped, her shoulders bowed as if grief were a weight that she had to carry.