I would have argued but my father raised his hand. ‘I command it, daughter,’ he insisted. ‘We live in this country as toads beneath the ploughshare. We cannot increase the risk to our lives. You have to bid him farewell. He is a named traitor. We cannot be associated with him.’

I bowed my head.

‘Daniel wishes it too.’

My head came up at that. ‘Why, whatever would he know about it?’

My father smiled. ‘He is not an ignorant boy, Hannah.’

‘He is not at court. He does not know the way of that world.’

‘He is going to be a very great physician,’ my father said gently. ‘Many nights he comes here and reads the books on herbs and medicines. He is studying the Greek texts on health and illness. You should not think that just because he is not a Spaniard, he is ignorant.’

‘But he can know nothing of the skills of the Moorish doctors,’ I said. ‘And you yourself told me that they were the wisest in the world. That they had learned all the Greeks had to teach and gone further.’

‘Yes,’ my father conceded. ‘But he is a thoughtful young man, and a hard worker, and he has a gift for study. He comes here twice a week to read. And he always asks for you.’

‘Does he?’

My father nodded. ‘He calls you his princess,’ he said.

I was so surprised for a moment that I could not speak. ‘His princess?’

‘Yes,’ my father said, smiling at my incomprehension. ‘He speaks like a young man in love. He comes to see me and he asks me, “How is my Princess?”—and he means you, Hannah.’

* * *

The coronation of my mistress, Lady Mary was set for the first day of October and the whole court, the whole city of London, and the whole country had spent much of the summer preparing for the celebration which would bring Henry’s daughter to his throne at last. There were faces missing from the crowds that lined the London streets. Devoted Protestants, mistrusting the queen’s sincere promise of tolerance, had already frightened themselves into exile, and fled overseas. They found a friendly reception in France; the traditional enemy of England was arming against England again. There were faces missing from the queen’s council; the queen’s father would have wondered where some of his favourites were now. Some were ashamed of their past treatment of her, some Protestants would not serve her, and some had the grace to stay home in their converted abbeys. But the rest of the court, city and country turned out in their thousands to greet the new queen, the queen whose rights they had defended against other, Protestant claimants, the Catholic queen whose enthusiastic faith they knew, and that, nonetheless, they preferred to all others.

It was a fairy-tale coronation, the first I had ever seen. It was a spectacle like something out of one of my father’s story books. A princess in a golden chariot, wearing blue velvet trimmed with white ermine, riding through the streets of her city, which were hung with tapestries, past fountains running with wine so that the very air was heady with the warm scent of it, past crowds who screamed with delight at the sight of their princess, their virgin queen, and pausing by groups of children who sang hymns in praise of the woman who had fought to be queen and was bringing the old religion back home again.