I slid my gaze from his face and took in a slight frame with broad shoulders, narrow waist, long legs: a handsome young man.

‘Yes,’ I said shortly. ‘I have a place at court.’

‘When you are sixteen you will have to leave court and come home again,’ he said.

I raised my eyebrows at this young stranger. ‘Who gives this order?’

‘I do.’

I allowed a frosty little silence to fall. ‘I don’t believe you have any command over me.’

‘When I am your husband . . .’

‘Then, yes.’

‘I am your betrothed. You are promised to me. I have some rights.’

I showed him a sulky face. ‘I am commanded by the king, I am commanded by the Duke of Northumberland, I am commanded by his son Lord Robert Dudley, I am commanded by my father; you might as well join in. Every other man in London seems to think he can order me.’

He gave a little gulp of involuntary laughter and at once his face was lighter, like a boy’s. He clipped me gently on my shoulder as if I were his comrade in a gang. I found I was smiling back at him. ‘Oh, poor maid,’ he said. ‘Poor set-upon maid.’

I shook my head. ‘Fool indeed.’

‘Don’t you want to come away from all these commanding men?’

I shrugged. ‘I am better living here, than being a burden on my father.’

‘You could come home with me.’

‘Then I would be a burden on you.’

‘When I have served my apprenticeship and I am a physician I will make a home for us.’

‘And when will that be?’ I asked him with the sharp cruelty of a young girl. Again I watched the slow painful rise of his blush.

‘Within two years,’ he said stiffly. ‘I shall be able to keep a wife by the time you are ready for marriage.’

‘Come for me then,’ I said unhelpfully. ‘Come with your orders then, if I am still here.’

‘In the meantime, we are still betrothed,’ he insisted.

I tried to read his face. ‘As much as we ever have been. The old women seem to have arranged it to their satisfaction if not to ours. Did you want more?’

‘I like to know where I am,’ he said stubbornly. ‘I have waited for you and your father to come from Paris and then from Amsterdam. For months we none of us knew if you were alive or dead. When you finally came to England I thought you would be glad of . . . be glad of . . . a home. And then I hear you and your father are to set up house together, you are not coming to live with Mother and me; and you have not put aside your boy’s costume. Then I hear you are working for him like a son. And then I hear you have left the protection of your father’s house. And now I find you at court.’