‘If it is my mother and my sisters . . .’ he started.

I raised my hand. ‘Peace, Daniel,’ I said gently. ‘They are what they are and I don’t like them; but if you had kept faith with me I would have found some way to live with them. Without our love, it all means nothing.’

‘So what will you do?’ he asked, and I could hear the despair in his voice.

‘I shall stay here with my father, and when the time serves, we shall return to England.’

‘You mean when the false princess comes to the throne and the traitor that you love comes out of the Tower,’ he accused me.

I turned my head away from him. ‘Whatever happens, it will be no concern of yours what I do,’ I said quietly. ‘Now, I want to go.’

Daniel put his hand on my arm, I could feel the heat of his palm through the thin linen of my sleeve. He was hot with torment. ‘Hannah, I love you,’ he said. ‘It is death to me, if you will not see me.’

I turned back to him and met his gaze straight, like a lad, not like a woman meeting her husband’s eyes. ‘Daniel, you have no-one but yourself to blame,’ I said flatly. ‘I am not a woman to be played with. You were false to me and I have cut my love for you out of my heart and out of my mind and nothing, nothing will restore it. You are a stranger to me now and for always. It is over. Go your way and I will go mine. It is finished.’

He gave a hoarse raw-throated sob and turned on his heel and plunged away. I went as quietly and as quickly as I could back to the shop, I went up the stairs to the little empty bedroom in which I had celebrated being free, and I put myself face down on the little bed, pulled a pillow over my head and cried silently for the love I had lost.

* * *

That was not the last I saw of him, but we did not speak intimately again. Most Sundays at church I would glimpse him, meticulously opening his missal and saying his prayers, observant to every movement of the Mass, never taking his eyes from the Host and the priest, as all of us always did. In their pew his mother and his sisters stole little glances at me, and once I saw them with a pretty vapid-looking fair-haired young woman with a baby on her hip and I guessed that she was the mother of Daniel’s child and that Daniel’s mother had taken it upon herself to bring her grandson to church.

I turned my head away from their curious glances but I felt an odd swimmy feeling that I had not known for years. I leaned forward and gripped the smooth time-worn wood of the pew and waited for the sensation to pass but it grew stronger. The Sight was coming to me.