‘Oh, not far,’ Lady Mary said grimly. ‘South of King’s Lynn, I am told. Something must have delayed him, he could have taken us here if he had come at once. But I cannot get news of him. I don’t know where he is for sure.’

‘Will he guess that we are going to Framlingham?’ I asked, thinking of the note that had gone to him, naming her destination here, its spiral on the paper like a curled snake.

She paused at the doorway and looked back at me. ‘There is bound to be one person in such a gathering who will slip away and tell him. There is always a spy in the camp. Don’t you think, Hannah?’

For a moment I thought she had trapped me. I looked up at her, my lies very dry in my throat, my girl’s face growing pale.

‘A spy?’ I quavered. I put my hand to my cheek and rubbed it hard.

She nodded. ‘I never trust anyone. I always know that there are spies about me. And if you had been the girl I was, you would have learned the same. After my father sent my mother away from me there was no-one near me who did not try to persuade me that Anne Boleyn was true queen and her bastard child the true heir. The Duke of Norfolk shouted into my face that if he were my father he would bang my head against the wall until my brains fell out. They made me deny my mother, they made me deny my faith, they threatened me with death on the scaffold like Thomas More and Bishop Fisher—men I knew and loved. I was a girl of twenty and they made me proclaim myself a bastard and my faith a heresy.

‘Then, all in a summer’s day, Anne was dead and all they spoke of was Queen Jane and her child, Edward, and little Elizabeth was no longer my enemy but a motherless child, a forgotten daughter, just like me. Then the other queens . . .’ She almost smiled. ‘One after another, three other women came to me and I was ordered to curtsey to them as queen and call them Mother, and none of them came close to my heart. In that long time I learned never to trust a word that any man says and never even to listen to a woman. The last woman I loved was my mother. The last man I trusted was my father. And he destroyed her, and she died of heartbreak, so what was I to think? Will I ever be a woman who can trust now?’

She broke off and looked at me. ‘My heart broke when I was a little more than twenty years old,’ she said wonderingly. ‘And d’you know, only now do I begin to think that there might be a life for me.’

She smiled. ‘Oh, Hannah!’ she sighed and patted me on the cheek. ‘Don’t look so grave. It was all a long time ago and if we can triumph in this adventure then my story is ended happily. I shall have my mother’s throne restored, I shall wear her jewels. I shall see her memory honoured and she will look down from heaven and see her daughter on the throne that she bore me to inherit. I shall think myself a happy woman. Don’t you see?’