The tears were running down my cheeks by the time I had written this to her dictation but she was calm.

‘You will get better, Your Grace,’ I assured her. ‘Jane told me that you are often ill with autumn sickness. When the first frosts come, you will be better and we will see in Christmas together.’

‘No,’ she said simply. There was not a trace of self-pity in her tone. It was as if she were weary of the world. ‘No. Not this time. I don’t think so.’

WINTER 1558

Lord Robert came to court with the queen’s council to press her to sign her will and name her heir. Every man in the council had been at Hatfield the previous month, all their advice for Queen Mary had been dictated by the queen in waiting.

‘She is too sick to see anyone,’ Jane Dormer said truculently.

She and I stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway to the queen’s apartments. Lord Robert winked at me but I did not smile back.

‘This is her duty,’ said the Lord Chancellor gently. ‘She has to make a will.’

‘She made one,’ Jane said abruptly. ‘Before she went into confinement last time.’

He shook his head and looked embarrassed. ‘She named her child as heir, and the king as regent,’ he said. ‘But there was no child. She has to name the Princess Elizabeth now, and no regent.’

Jane hesitated, but I stood firm. ‘She is too ill,’ I maintained. It was true, the queen was coughing up black bile, unable to lie down as her mouth filled with the stuff. Also, I did not want them to see her on her sickbed, still weeping for her husband, for the ruin that Elizabeth had made of her hopes.

Lord Robert smiled at me, as if he understood all of this. ‘Mistress Carpenter,’ he said. ‘You know. She is queen. She cannot have the peace and seclusion of a normal woman. She knows that, we know that. She has a duty to her country and you should not stand in her way.’

I wavered, and they saw it. ‘Stand aside,’ said the duke, and Jane and I stood unwillingly back and let them walk in to the queen.

* * *

They did not take very long, and when they were gone I went in to see her. She was lying propped up on her pillows, a bowl at her side to catch the black bile which spewed from her mouth when she coughed, a jug of squeezed lemons and sugar to take the taste from her lips, a maid in attendance but no-one else. She was as lonely as any beggar coughing out her life on a stranger’s doorstep.

‘Your Grace, I sent your letter to your husband,’ I said quietly. ‘Pray God he reads it and comes home to you and you have a merry Christmas with him after all.’

Queen Mary did not even smile at the picture I painted. ‘He will not,’ she said dully. ‘And I would rather not see him ride past me to Hatfield.’ She coughed and held a cloth to her mouth. The maid stepped forward and took it from her, offered her the bowl, and then took it away.