Lady Mary turned to her maid in waiting. ‘You will be pleased to hear that, Susan! Now you will not need to read to me in the afternoons.’

Susan did not look at all pleased to hear that she was to be supplanted by a fool in livery, but she took a seat on a stool like the other women and took up some sewing.

‘You shall tell me all the news of the court,’ the Lady Mary invited me. ‘Perhaps we should talk alone.’

One nod to the ladies and they took themselves off to the bay window and seated themselves in a circle in the brighter light, talking quietly as if to give us the illusion of privacy. I imagined every one of them was straining to hear what I might say.

‘My brother the king?’ she asked me, gesturing that I should sit on a cushion at her feet. ‘Do you have any messages from him?’

‘No, Lady Mary,’ I said, and saw her disappointment.

‘I was hoping he would have thought of me more kindly, now he is so ill,’ she said. ‘When he was a little boy I nursed him through half a dozen illnesses, I hoped he would remember that and think that we . . .’

I waited for her to say more but then she tapped her fingertips together as if to draw herself back from memories. ‘No matter,’ she said. ‘Any other messages?’

‘The duke sends you some game and some early salad leaves,’ I said. ‘They came in the cart with the furniture, and have been taken round to your kitchens. And he asked me to give you this letter.’

She took it and broke the seal and smoothed it out. I saw her smile and then I heard her warm chuckle. ‘You bring me very good news, Hannah the Fool,’ she said. ‘This is a payment under the will of my late father which has been owed to me all this long while, since his death. I thought I would never see it, but here it is, a draft on a London goldsmith. I can pay my bills and face the shopkeepers of Ware again.’

‘I am glad of it,’ I said awkwardly, not knowing what else to say.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You would have thought that King Henry’s only legitimate daughter would have had her fortune in her own hands by now, but they have delayed and withheld until I thought they wanted me to starve to death here. But now I come into favour.’

She paused, thoughtful. ‘The question which remains, is, why I am suddenly to be so well treated.’ She looked speculatively at me. ‘Is Lady Elizabeth given her inheritance too? Are you to visit her with such a letter?’

I shook my head. ‘My lady, how would I know? I am only a messenger.’

‘No word of it? She’s not at court visiting my brother now?’

‘She wasn’t there when I left,’ I said cautiously.