‘I was accused of heresy,’ I said. ‘But released. I have done nothing wrong.’

‘You have done enough to be hanged for treason, strangled for a witch, and burned as a heretic three times over,’ he said without a glimmer of a smile. ‘By rights you should be on your knees to me, begging me to take you away.’

I was half a moment from outraged exclamation when I saw that he was teasing me and I broke into an unwilling laugh. At once he gleamed and took my hand and brought it to his lips. The touch of his mouth on my fingers was warm, I could feel his breath on my skin, and for a moment I could see nothing and hear nothing and think of nothing but his touch.

‘You need not beg,’ he said softly. ‘I would have come for you anyway. I cannot go on living without you.’

Our road took us past the Tower. I felt, rather than saw, Daniel stiffen as the lowering shadow of Robert Dudley’s prison fell on us.

‘You know, I could not help loving him,’ I said in a small voice. ‘When I first saw him I was a child, and he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen in my life and the son of the greatest man in England.’

‘Well, now you are a woman and he is a traitor,’ Daniel said flatly. ‘And you are mine.’

I shot a sideways smile at him. ‘As you say, husband,’ I said meekly. ‘Whatever you say.’

* * *

The ship was waiting as Daniel had arranged and we had a few hours of hard work loading the pieces of the dismantled press and the barrels and boxes of books and papers before finally we were all aboard and the sailors cast off, the barges took us in tow, and the ship went slowly downriver, helped by the ebbing tide. My father had brought a hamper of food and we sat on the deck, sometimes shrinking from a passing sailor running to obey an order, and ate cold chicken and a strange strong-tasting cheese and a hard crunchy bread.

‘You’ll have to get used to this fare,’ Daniel laughed at me. ‘This is Calais food.’

‘Shall we stay in Calais?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘It’s not safe for us for ever,’ he said. ‘Soon Queen Mary will turn her attention there too. The place is riddled with runaway Protestants and Lutherans and Erastians and all sorts of heretics, anxious to have a quick exit to France, or Flanders or Germany. Plotters too. And the kingdom of France has its own battle with the Huguenots or anyone who is not an orthodox son of the church. Between the two powers I think that people like us will be squeezed out.’

I felt the familiar sense of injustice. ‘Squeezed out to where now?’ I asked.

Daniel smiled at me and put his hand over my own. ‘Peace, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I have found a home for us. We are going to go to Genoa.’