The greater world which was Lord Robert’s natural element was to her a place of continuous threat and danger. She saw his ambition, his natural God-given ambition, as a danger, she saw his opportunities all as risk. She was, in every sense of the word, a hopeless wife to him.

* * *

Finally, in the second week in February, she sent for him. One of his men was told to ride to the court at Richmond where the queen had entered her confinement chamber to have her child. Her ladyship told the servant to tell his lordship that she needed him at Chichester, and to wait to accompany him home.

‘Why would she not write to him?’ I asked Mrs Oddingsell, surprised that Lady Dudley would broadcast to the world her desire that he should come home.

She hesitated. ‘She can do as she chooses, I suppose,’ she said rudely.

It was her discomfiture that revealed the truth to me. ‘Can she not write?’ I asked.

Mrs Oddingsell scowled at me. ‘Not well,’ she conceded reluctantly.

‘Why not?’ I demanded, a bookseller’s daughter to whom reading and writing was a skill like eating and walking.

‘When would she learn?’ Mrs Oddingsell countered. ‘She was just a girl when she married him, and nothing more than a bride when he was in the Tower. Her father did not think a woman needed to know more than to sign her name, and her husband never spared the time to teach her. She can write, but slowly, and she can read if she has to.’

‘You don’t need a man to teach you to read and write,’ I said. ‘It is a skill a woman can get on her own. I could teach her, if she wanted it.’

Mrs Oddingsell turned her head. ‘She wouldn’t demean herself to learn from you,’ she said rudely. ‘She would only ever learn for him. And he does not trouble himself.’

The messenger did not wait, but came home straight away, and told her that his lordship had said he would come to us for a visit shortly and in the meantime to assure her ladyship that all was well with him.

‘I told you to wait for an answer,’ she said irritably.

‘My lady, he said he would see you soon. And the princess . . .’

Her head snapped up. ‘The princess? Which princess? Elizabeth?’

‘Yes, the Princess Elizabeth swore that he could not go while they were all waiting for the queen’s child to be born. She said they could not endure another confinement which might go on for years. She could not abide it without him. And my lord said yes, he would leave, even a lady such as her, for he had not seen you since he came to England, and you had bidden him to come to you.’

She blushed a little at that, her vanity kindled like a flame. ‘And what more?’ she asked.

The messenger looked a little awkward. ‘Just some jesting between my lord and the princess,’ he said.