She turned towards the house. ‘Come, Hannah!’ she threw over her shoulder. ‘Come quickly!’

She wrote to warn Elizabeth, she wrote for advice. I did not see either letter; but that night I took the manuscript Lord Robert had given to me, and using my father’s letter as the base of the code I carefully wrote out the message. ‘M is much alarmed that she is left out of the prayers. She believes that Lady J will be named heir. She has written to Eliz to warn her. And to the Sp ambassador for advice.’ I paused then. It was arduous work, translating every letter into another, but I wanted to write something, a line, a word, to remind him of me, to prompt him to recall me to court. Some line, some simple thing that he would read and think of me, not as his spy, not as a fool, but as me, myself, a girl who had promised to serve him heart and soul, for love.

‘I miss you,’ I wrote, and then I scratched it out, not even troubling to translate it into code.

‘When can I come home?’ went the same way.

‘I am frightened,’ was the most honest of all the confessions.

In the end I wrote nothing, there was nothing I could think of that would turn Lord Robert’s attention to me, while the boy king was dying and his own young white-faced sister-in-law was stepping up to the throne of England and bringing the Dudley family to absolute greatness.

* * *

Then there was nothing to do but to wait for news of the death of the king to come from London. Lady Mary had her own private messages coming and going. But every three days or so she received a letter from the duke to tell her that the fine weather was doing its business and the king was on the mend, that his fever had broken, that his chest pains were better, that a new doctor had been appointed who had high hopes that the king would be well by midsummer. I watched Lady Mary read these optimistic notes through once, saw her eyes narrow slightly in disbelief; and then she folded them and put them away in a drawer in her writing desk, and never looked at them again.

Then, in the first days of July, one letter made her snatch her breath and put a hand to her heart.

‘How is the king, my Lady?’ I asked her. ‘Not worse?’

Her colour burned in her cheeks. ‘The duke says that he is better, that he has rallied and that he wants to see me.’ She rose to her feet and paced to the window. ‘Please God he is indeed better,’ she said quietly to herself. ‘Better, and wanting to restore me to our old affection, better, and seeing through his false advisors. Perhaps God has given him strength to get well and to come to a right understanding at last. Or at least well enough to put a stop to this plot. Oh, Mother of God, guide me in what I should do.’