‘Can I get a message to him as he is released?’ I asked.

Lord Robert shook his head. ‘You will have to trust that he will come and find you,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Is he the faithful type of man?’

I thought of his years of steady waiting for me, and how he had watched me come to my love of him, and how he had let me go and return to him. ‘Yes,’ I said shortly.

Lord Robert sprang up into the saddle. ‘If you see John Dee would you tell him that Princess Elizabeth wants that map of his,’ he said.

‘Why would she want a map?’ I asked, immediately suspicious.

Lord Robert winked at me. He leaned from his horse and spoke very low. ‘If the queen dies without naming Elizabeth as her heir then we may have a battle on our hands.’

His horse shifted and I stepped back quickly. ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Not again.’

‘No fight with the people of England,’ he assured me. ‘They want the Protestant princess. But with the Spanish king. D’you think he’d let such a prize slip away if he thought he could come over and claim it for himself?’

‘You are arming and planning for war again?’ I asked, dreading the answer.

‘Why else would I want my soldiers back?’ he demanded. ‘Thank you for your help with that, Hannah.’

I choked on my shock. ‘My lord!’

He patted the horse’s neck and tightened the rein. ‘It’s always a coil,’ he said simply. ‘And you are always in it, Hannah. You cannot live with a queen and not be enmeshed in a dozen plots. You live in a snake pit and I tell you frankly, you have not the aptitude for it. Now go to her. I hear she is worse.’

‘Not at all,’ I said stoutly. ‘You can tell the princess that the queen has rallied and is better today.’

He nodded, he did not believe me at all. ‘Well, God bless her anyway,’ he said kindly. ‘For whether she lives or dies she has lost Calais, she has lost her babies, she has lost her husband and lost the throne and lost everything.’

* * *

Lord Robert was gone for more than a week and so I could have no news of the release of the English captives. I went to our old print shop and pinned a note on the door. The times were so bad and rents so poor in London that still no-one had taken the shop, and many of my father’s books and papers would still be stacked, untouched, in the cellar. I thought that if Daniel did not come to me, and if the queen did not recover, then this might be my refuge once again. I might set up as a bookseller once again, and hope for better times.

I went to Daniel’s old house which was at Newgate, just past St Paul’s. The neighbours there had not heard of the Carpenter family, they were new in the city. They had come hoping to find work after their farm in Sussex had failed. I looked at their cold pinched faces and wished them well. They promised to tell Daniel, if he should come, that his wife had been seeking him and was waiting for him at court.