She picked six men to escort us, gave her followers a brief leave-taking and snapped her fingers for her Master of Horse to help her into the saddle. She wheeled her horse round and led us out of Hoddesdon, back the way we had come out of the town. But this time we took the great road north, racing away from London, as the sun slowly wheeled overhead and then set on our left, as the sky lost its colour, and a small silvery moon rose over the dark silhouettes of trees.

‘Where are we going, Lady Mary? It’s getting dark,’ Lady Margaret asked plaintively. ‘We can’t ride in the dark.’

‘Kenninghall,’ Lady Mary crisply replied.

‘Where’s Kenninghall?’ I asked, seeing Lady Margaret’s aghast face.

‘Norfolk,’ she said as if it were the end of the world. ‘God help us, she’s running away.’

‘Running away?’ I felt my throat tense at the scent of danger.

‘It’s towards the sea. She’ll get a ship out of Lowestoft and run to Spain. Whatever that man told her must mean that she’s in such danger that she has to get out of the country altogether.’

‘What danger?’ I asked urgently.

Lady Margaret shrugged. ‘Who knows? A charge of treason? But what about us? If she goes to Spain I’m riding for home. I’m not going to be stuck with a traitor for a mistress. It’s been bad enough in England, I’ll not be exiled to Spain.’

I said nothing, I was feverishly racking my brains to think of where I might be safest: at home with my father, with Lady Mary, or taking a horse and trying to get back to Lord Robert.

‘What about you?’ she pressed me.

I shook my head, my voice quite lost in fear, my hand feverishly rubbing at my cheek. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I should go home, I suppose. But I don’t know the way on my own. I don’t know what my father would want me to do. I don’t understand the rights and the wrongs of it.’

She laughed, a bitter laugh for a young woman. ‘There are no rights and wrongs,’ she said. ‘There are only those who are likely to win and those who are likely to lose. And Lady Mary with six men, me and a fool, up against the Duke of Northumberland with his army and the Tower of London and every castle in the kingdom, is going to lose.’

* * *

It was a punishing ride. We did not check until it was fully night, when we paused at the home of a gentleman, John Huddlestone, at Sawston Hall. I begged a piece of paper and a pen from the housekeeper and wrote a letter, not to Lord Robert, whose address I did not dare to give, but to John Dee. ‘My dear tutor,’ I wrote, hoping this would mislead anyone who opened my letter, ‘this little riddle may amuse you.’ Then underneath I wrote the coded letters in the form of a serpentine circle, hoping to make it look like a game that a girl of my age might send to a kind scholar. It simply read, ‘She is going to Kenninghall.’ And then I wrote: ‘What am I to do?’