‘You can go,’ she said to me, as she threw the servant girl’s cloak from her shoulders to the floor, and turned her back to the maid to be unlaced. ‘Find something to eat and go straight to bed. You must be tired out.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, hobbling for the door with my painful bow-legged stride.

‘And, Hannah?’

‘Yes, lady . . . Yes, Your Grace?’

‘Whoever it is who has paid your wages while you have been in my household, and whatever they hoped to gain from that—you have been a good friend to me this day. I will not forget it.’

I paused, thinking of the two letters I had written to Lord Robert that would bring him hard on our heels, thinking what would happen to this determined, ambitious woman when he caught us, thinking that he was certain to catch us here, since I had told him exactly where to come; and then it would be the Tower for her, and probably her death for treason. I had been a spy in her household and the falsest of friends. I had been a byword for dishonour and she had known some of it; but she could not have dreamed of the falseness that had become second nature to me.

If I could have confessed to her then, I would have done. The words were on my tongue, I wanted to tell her that I had been put into her household to work against her; but that now that I knew her, and loved her, I would do anything to serve her. I wanted to tell her that Robert Dudley was my lord and I would always be bound to do anything he asked me. I wanted to tell her that everything I did seemed to be always full of contradictions: black and white, love and fear, all at once.

But I could say nothing, and I had been brought up to hold secrets under my lying tongue, so I just dropped to one knee before her and bowed my head.

She did not give me her hand to kiss, like a queen would have done. She put her hand on my head like my own mother used to do and she said, ‘God bless you, Hannah, and keep you safe from sin.’

At that moment, at that particular tenderness, at the very touch of my mother’s hand, I felt the tears well up in my eyes; and I got myself out of the room and into my own small attic bedchamber and into my bed without bath or dinner, before anybody should see me cry like the little girl I still was.

* * *

We were at Kenninghall for three days on siege alert, but still Lord Robert and his company of cavalry did not come. The gentlemen from the country all around the manor came pouring in with their servants and their kinsmen, some of them armed, some of them bringing blacksmiths to hammer out spears and lances from the pruning hooks, spades and scythes that they brought with them. The Lady Mary proclaimed herself as queen in the great hall, despite the advice of more cautious men, and flying in the face of a pleading letter from the Spanish ambassador. He had written to tell her that her brother was dead, that Northumberland was unbeatable, and that she should set about negotiating with him while her uncle in Spain would do his best to save her from the trumped-up charge of treason and sentence of death which was certain to come. That part of his letter made her look grim, but there was worse.