A light step on the path made him quickly turn, dropping Elizabeth’s gown and putting her behind him, out of sight. Anyone could read the tranced willingness on the girl’s face; she was lost in her desire. He was afraid it was the queen, his wife, whose love for him was insulted every day that he seduced her ward under her very nose: the queen, who had been entrusted with the care of her stepdaughter the princess, Queen Katherine who had sat at Henry VIII’s deathbed but dreamed of this man.

But it was not the queen who stood before him on the path. It was only a girl, a little girl of about nine years old, with big solemn dark eyes and a white Spanish cap tied under her chin. She carried two books strapped with bookseller’s tape in her hand, and she regarded him with a cool objective interest, as if she had seen and understood everything.

‘How now, sweetheart!’ he exclaimed, falsely cheerful. ‘You gave me a start. I might have thought you a fairy, appearing so suddenly.’

She frowned at his rapid, over-loud speech, and then she replied, very slowly with a strong Spanish accent. ‘Forgive me, sir. My father told me to bring these books to Sir Thomas Seymour and they said you were in the garden.’

She proffered the package of books, and Tom Seymour was forced to step forward and take them from her hands. ‘You’re the bookseller’s daughter,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The bookseller from Spain.’

She bowed her head in assent, not taking her dark scrutiny from his face.

‘What are you staring at, child?’ he asked, conscious of Elizabeth, hastily rearranging her gown behind him.

‘I was looking at you, sir, but I saw something most dreadful.’

‘What?’ he demanded. For a moment he was afraid she would say that she had seen him with the Princess of England backed up against a tree like a common doxy, her skirt pulled up out of the way and his fingers dabbling at her purse.

‘I saw a scaffold behind you,’ said the surprising child, and then turned and walked away as if she had completed her errand and there was nothing more for her to do in the sunlit garden.

Tom Seymour whirled back to Elizabeth, who was trying to comb her disordered hair with fingers that were still shaking with desire. At once she stretched out her arms to him, wanting more.

‘Did you hear that?’

Elizabeth’s eyes were slits of black. ‘No,’ she said silkily. ‘Did she say something?’

‘She only said that she saw the scaffold behind me!’ He was more shaken than he wanted to reveal. He tried for a bluff laugh, but it came out with a quaver of fear.

At the mention of the scaffold Elizabeth was suddenly alert. ‘Why?’ she snapped. ‘Why should she say such a thing?’

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Stupid little witch. Probably mistook the word, she’s foreign. Probably meant throne! Probably saw the throne behind me!’