“In his usual rooms,” Henry says with a little grimace at his own embarrassment. “Safe and sound, of course. Safe in our keeping.”

“Why did we not stay at Greenwich? Is there some danger that you’re not telling me about?”

“Oh no, no danger.” He rubs his hands before the fire again and speaks so airily that I am now certain something is badly wrong.

“Then why have we come here?”

He glances to make sure that the door is locked. “One of the boy’s greatest adherents, Sir Robert Clifford, is coming back home to England. He betrayed me, but now he’s coming back to me. He can come here and report to me, thinking to win my favor, and I can arrest him without further trouble. He can go from privy chamber to prison—just down a flight of steps!” He smiles as if it is a great advantage to live in a prison for traitors.

“Sir Robert?” I repeat. “I thought he had betrayed you without possibility of return when he left England? I thought he had run away to be with the boy?”

“He was with the boy!” Henry is exultant. “He was with the boy and the foolish boy trusted him with all his treasure and his plans. But he has brought them all to me. And a sack.”

“A sack?”

Henry nods. He is watching me carefully. “A sack of seals. Everyone who is plotting for the boy in England, everyone who ever sent him a letter closed it under their seal. The boy received the letter and cut the seal from it, he kept the seals, by way of a pledge. And now, Sir Robert brings me the sack of seals. I have every seal. A complete collection, Elizabeth, that identifies everyone who is plotting for the boy against me.”

His face is jubilant, like a rat catcher with a hundred rat tails.

“Do you know how many? Can you guess how many?” I can tell by the tone of his voice that he thinks he is setting a trap for me.

“How many?”

“Hundreds.”

“Hundreds? He has hundreds of supporters?”

“But now I know them all. Do you know the names on the list?”

I have to bite my tongue on my impatience. “Of course I don’t know who wrote to the boy. I don’t know how many seals and I don’t know who they are. I don’t even know if it is a true collection,” I say. “What if it is false? What if there are names on it of men who are faithful to you, who perhaps wrote long ago to Duchess Margaret? What if the boy has sent you this sack on purpose, and Sir Robert is working for him, to fill you with doubt? What if the boy is sowing fear among us?”

I see him catch his breath at a possibility that he had not considered. “Clifford has returned to me—the only one who has returned to me!—and brought me information as good as gold,” he says flatly.