‘What are you afraid of?’ she asked bluntly.

For a moment I was so taken aback I could have told her. I was afraid of arrest, of the Inquisition, afraid of suspicion, afraid of the torture chamber and the heretic’s death with kindling heaped around my bare feet and no way to escape. I was afraid of betraying others to their deaths, afraid of the very air of conspiracy itself. I rubbed my cheek with the back of my hand. ‘I am just a little nervous,’ I said quietly. ‘I am new to this country, and to court life.’

She let the silence run and then she looked at me more kindly. ‘Poor child, you are very young to be adrift, all alone in these deep waters.’

‘I am Lord Robert’s vassal,’ I said. ‘I am not alone.’

She smiled. ‘Perhaps you will be very good company,’ she said finally. ‘There have been days and months and even years when I would have been very glad of a merry face and an uplifted voice.’

‘I am not a witty fool,’ I said cautiously. ‘I am not supposed to be especially merry.’

Lady Mary laughed aloud at that. ‘And I am not supposed to be given especially to laughter,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you will suit me very well. And now, you must meet my companions.’

She called her ladies over to us and named them to me. One or two were the daughters of determined heretics, holding on to the old faith and serving a Roman Catholic princess for pride, two others had the dismal faces of younger daughters with scanty dowries whose chance of service to an out-of-favour princess was only slightly better than the marriage they would have been forced to undertake if they had been left at home. It was a little court with the smell of desperation, on the edge of the kingdom, on the edge of heresy, on the edge of legitimacy.

After dinner the Lady Mary went to Mass. She was supposed to go alone, it was a crime for anyone else to observe the service; but in practice, she went openly and knelt at the very front of the chapel and the rest of her household crept in at the back.

I followed her ladies to the chapel door and then I hovered in a frenzy of worry as to what I should do. I had assured the king and Lord Robert that my father and I were of the reformed faith, but both the king and Lord Robert knew that Lady Mary’s household was an island of illegal Papist practices in a Protestant kingdom. I could feel myself sweating with fear as the meanest housemaid slipped past me to say her prayers, and I did not know the safest thing for me to do. I was in a terror of being reported to the court for being a Roman Catholic, and yet how could I serve in this household as a steadfast Protestant?