“Perhaps she will be,” Maggie suggests. “Perhaps she will survive. Babies are unpredictable, perhaps she will grow stronger.”

I shake my head on my doubts, and that night, at about midnight, when I am wakened by a deep yellow autumn moon shining through the slats of the shutters, my thoughts go at once to my sick baby. I get up and put on my robe. At once Maggie, sleeping in my bed, is awake. “Are you ill?”

“No. Just troubled. I want to see Elizabeth. You go to sleep.”

“I’ll come with you,” she says, and slips out of bed and throws a shawl over her nightgown.

Together we open the door and the dozing sentry gives a jolt of surprise as if we are a pair of ghosts, white-faced with our hair plaited under our nightcaps. “It’s all right,” Maggie says. “Her Grace is going to the nursery.”

He and his fellow guard follow us as we walk in our bare feet down the cold stone corridor, and then Maggie pauses. “What is it?” she asks.

“I thought I heard something,” I say quietly. “Can you hear it? Like singing?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing. I can’t hear anything.”

I know what the sound is then, and I turn to the nursery in sudden urgency. I quicken my stride, I start to run, I push my way past the guard and race up the stone steps to the tower, where the nursery is warm and safe at the top. As I open the door the nurse starts up from where she is bending over the little crib, her face aghast, saying: “Your Grace! I was just going to send for you!”

I snatch up Elizabeth into my arms and she is warm and breathing quietly but white, fatally white, and her eyelids and her lips as blue as cornflowers. I kiss her for the last time and I see her fleeting tiny smile, for she knows I am here, and then I hold her, I don’t move at all, I just stand and hold her to my heart as I feel the little chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and then become still.

“Is she asleep?” Maggie asks hopefully.

I shake my head and I feel the tears running down my face. “No. She’s not asleep. She’s not asleep.”

In the morning, after I have washed her little body and dressed her in her nightgown, I send a short message to her father to tell him that our little daughter is dead. He comes home so quickly that I guess he had the news ahead of my letter. He has a spy set on me, as he has on everyone else in England, and that they have already told him that I ran from my bedchamber in the middle of the night to hold my daughter in my arms as she died.

He comes into my rooms in a rush and kneels before me, as I am seated, dressed in dark blue, in my chair by my fireside. His head is bowed as he reaches blindly for me. “My love,” he says quietly.