‘Have you heard? Have you heard?’ the girl whispered to me as we turned into the queen’s presence chamber. The gallery was crowded with people who had come to see the queen, most of them to ask for clemency for people on trial for heresy.

‘Heard what?’ I said crossly. I pulled my sleeve from the grip of an old lady who was trying to waylay me. ‘Dame, I can do nothing for you.’

‘It is not for me, it is my son,’ she said. ‘My boy.’

Despite myself, I paused.

‘I have money saved, he could go abroad if the queen would be so good as to send him into exile.’

‘You are pleading for exile for your son?’

‘Bishop Bonner has him.’ She needed to say nothing more.

I pulled back from her as if she had the plague. ‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘I can do nothing.’

‘If you would intercede for him? His name is Joseph Woods?’

‘Dame, if I asked for mercy for him my own life would be forfeit,’ I told her. ‘You are at risk in even speaking to me. Go home and pray for his soul.’

She looked at me as if I were a savage. ‘You tell a mother to pray for her son’s soul when he is innocent of anything?’

‘Yes,’ I said bleakly.

The maid in waiting drew me away impatiently. ‘The news!’ she reminded me.

‘Yes, what?’ I turned from the uncomprehending pain on the old woman’s face, knowing that the best advice to her would be to take the money she had saved for her son’s release and buy instead a purse of gunpowder to hang around his neck so that he did not suffer for hours in the fire but blew up as soon as the flames were lit.

‘The Princess Elizabeth is accused of treason!’ the maid in waiting hissed at me, desperate to tell her news. ‘Her servants are all arrested. They’re tearing her London house apart, searching it.’

Despite the heat of the crowd, I felt myself freeze, right down to my toes in my boots. ‘Elizabeth? What treason?’ I whispered.

‘A plot to kill the queen,’ the girl said in a breath of ice.

‘Who else with her?’

‘I don’t know! Nobody knows! Kat Ashley, for certain, perhaps all of them.’

I nodded, I knew somebody who would know. I extricated myself from the train that was following the queen into her presence chamber. She would be in there for at least two hours, listening to one claim after another, people asking her for favours, for mercy, for places, for money. At every plea she would look more weary, older by far than her forty years. But she would not miss me while I ran down the gallery to the great hall.

Will was not there, a soldier directed me to the stable-yard and I found him in a loose box, playing with one of the deerhound puppies. The animal, all long legs and excitement, clambered all over him.