Lady Amy did not even have the native wit to invite him to talk, even if she knew nothing herself. She pursed her lips whenever he spoke of a woman, she looked down in disapproval when he laughingly mentioned the queen. She was downright rude to John Dee whom she clearly regarded as a turncoat from the defeated Protestant cause. But she was no enthusiast for news of the Princess Elizabeth either.

I thought that when my lord had first met her he must have loved the unspoiled freshness of her, when she was a young girl who knew nothing of the court or of his father’s sly progress to power. When she was a simple squire’s daughter in Norfolk with big blue eyes and large breasts pressing against the neck of her gown, she must have seemed to be everything that the ladies of court were not: honest, unsophisticated, true. But now all those virtues were disadvantages to him. He needed a wife who could watch the direction of change, could trim her speech and style to the prevailing tides, and could watch and caution him. He needed a wife who was quick in understanding and skilled in any company, a wife he could take to court, and know he had a spy and an ally among the ladies.

Instead he was burdened with a woman who, in her vanity, was prepared to insult the chaplain of one of the most powerful priests in the country, who had no interest in the doings of the court and the wider world, and who resented his interest.

‘We’ll never have another Dudley if she does not make more effort with him,’ one of the upper maids whispered indiscreetly to me.

‘What ails her?’ I demanded. ‘I’d have thought she would be all over him.’

‘She can never forgive him for going to court in his father’s train. She thought his imprisonment would teach him a lesson. Teach him not to over-reach himself.’

‘He’s a Dudley,’ I said. ‘They’re born to over-reach themselves. They’re from the greediest most ambitious line in the world. Only a Spaniard likes gold better than a Dudley, only an Irishman desires more land.’

I looked down the table at Amy. She was eating a sweetmeat, the sugared plum distending her mouth as she sucked on it. She was staring straight ahead, ignoring her husband’s intense conversation with John Dee. ‘You know her well?’

The older woman nodded. ‘Yes, and I’ve come to pity her. She likes a small station in life and she wants him to be small too.’

‘She’d have done better to have chosen a country squire then,’ I said. ‘For Robert Dudley is a man with a great future, not a small one, and he will never allow her to stand in his way.’

‘She will pull him down if she can,’ the woman warned.

I shook my head. ‘Not her.’

* * *

Amy had hoped to sit up late with her husband, or to go to bed early together, but at eight o’clock he made excuses and he and John Dee and I gathered in John Dee’s room with the door closed, the shutters across the window and only one candle lit and glowing in the mirror.