None of us answered. She took the hood from the waiting woman’s hands and put it on, meeting her own honest eyes in the mirror. “The king will have ordered him to go. I know Feria, he is not a man to plot willfully. The king will have ordered him to go.”

She was silent for a moment, thinking what she should do. I kept my gaze down, I could not bear to look up and see her, facing the knowledge that her own husband was sending messages to her heir, to her rival, to his mistress.

When she turned back to us her expression was calm. “Hannah, a word with you, please,” she said, extending her hand.

I went to her side and she took my arm and leaned on me slightly as we walked from the room to her presence chamber. “I want you to go to Elizabeth,” she said quietly, as they opened the doors. There was hardly anyone outside waiting to see her. They were all at Hatfield. “Just go as if for a visit. Tell her you have recently come back from Calais and wanted to see how she did. Can you do that?”

“I would have to take my son,” I temporized.

“Take him,” she nodded. “And see if you can find out from Elizabeth herself, or from her ladies, what Count Feria wanted with her.”

“They may tell me nothing,” I said uncomfortably. “Surely, they will know I serve you.”

“You can ask,” she said. “And you are the only friend that I can trust who will gain admission to Elizabeth. You have always passed between us. She likes you.”

“Perhaps the ambassador was making nothing more than a courtesy visit.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But it may be that the king is pressing her to marry the Prince of Savoy. She has sworn to me that she will not have him but Elizabeth has no principles, she has only appearances. If the king promised to support her claim to be my heir, she might think it worth her while to marry his cousin. I have to know.”

“When d’you want me to go?” I asked unwillingly.

“At first light tomorrow,” she said. “And don’t write to me, I am surrounded by spies. I will wait for you to tell me what she is planning when you come back to me.”

Queen Mary released my arm and went on alone into dinner. As the noblemen and the gentry rose to their feet as she walked toward the high table in the great hall I noticed how small she seemed: a diminutive woman overwhelmed by her duties in a hostile world. I watched her step up to her throne, seat herself and look around her depleted court with her tight determined smile and thought – not for the first time – that she was the most courageous woman I had ever known. A woman with the worst luck in the world.

It was a merry ride to Hatfield for Danny and me. He rode the horse astride before me until he grew too tired, and then I strapped him to my back and he slept, rocked by the jolting. I had an escort of two men to keep me safe; since the epidemic of illness of the winter, and the hardship of one bad harvest after another, the roads were continually threatened by highwaymen, bandits or just vagrants and beggars who would shout for money and threaten violence. But with the two men trotting behind us, Daniel and I were lighthearted. The weather was fine, the rain had stopped at last, and the sun was so hot by midday that we were pleased to break our fast in a field, sheltering in a wood, or sometimes by a river or stream. I let Danny paddle his feet, or sit bare-arsed in the water while it splashed around him. He was steady on his feet now, he made little rushes forward and back to me, and he continually demanded to be lifted upward to see more, to touch things, or simply to pat my face and turn my gaze this way and that.

As we rode I sang to him, the Spanish songs of my childhood, and I was certain that he heard me. His little hand would wave in time to the music, he would give a little wriggle of pleasure when I started singing, but he never joined in the tune. He remained as silent as a leveret in hiding, as a fawn in the bracken.

The old palace at Hatfield had been the royal nursery for generations, chosen for its clean air and proximity to London. It was an old building, small-windowed and dark-beamed, and the men led the way to the front door so that Danny and I might dismount and go inside while they took the horses away to the ramshackle stable block at a little distance from the house.

There was no one in the hall to greet us but a boy bringing in logs for the fire which was kept going, even in midsummer. “They’re all in the garden,” he said. “Acting a play.”

His gesture directed me to a door at the rear of the hall and with Danny in my arms I opened it, followed the stone corridor to another door and then stepped out into the sunshine.

What playacting there had been was clearly over, and what was left was a romp. Veils of cloth of gold and silver and overturned chairs were scattered around the orchard, and Elizabeth’s ladies were running in all directions from a man in the center of the circle with a dark scarf over his face to blindfold him. As I watched he caught a flying skirt and drew a girl to him but she wriggled free and ran away laughing. They gathered around him and with much giggling and cooing they turned him round and round until he was dizzy and then they retreated. Again he dashed and lunged, while they ran this way and that, giggling with that heady mixture of girlish playfulness and female arousal. Among them, her red hair flying loose, her hood cast away, her face flushed and laughing, was the princess. She was not the Elizabeth I had seen white-faced with terror. She was not the princess I had seen bloated on her bed, sick to her very bones with fear. She was a princess coming into the midsummer of her life, coming into her womanhood, coming to the throne. She was a fairytale princess, beautiful, powerful, willful, infallible.

“Well, glory be,” I whispered to myself, as skeptical as any fool.

As I watched she tapped the blindfolded man on the shoulder and made to run back again. This time he was too quick for her. His hand flashed out, she sprang back just too slowly, he snatched her at the waist and though she struggled he held her close. He must have felt her panting against him. He must have smelled the perfume in her hair. He must have known her at once.

“I have caught you!” he called out. “Who is it?”

“You have to guess! You have to guess!” the ladies cried.

He ran his hand over her forehead, her hair, her nose, her lips. “A beauty,” he said certainly. He was rewarded by a gale of shocked laughter.

Impertinently, he let his hand stray down over her chin, down her neck, he took her throat in his hand. I saw the color flame into Elizabeth’s cheeks and I realized she was on fire with desire at his touch. She did not step back from him, she did not move to check him. She was ready to stand before him and let him finger her all over, watched by all her court.

I moved a little forward to see this man better, but the blindfold covered all of his face, I could see only his thick dark hair and the strong square shoulders. I thought I knew who this man was.

He held her firmly, and there was a little whisper almost of dismay from her ladies as he gripped her with one hand at the waist, and with the other traced the border of the neck of her gown, his fingertips brushing the tops of her breasts. Slowly, tantalizingly, he slid his hand down the front of her gown over the embroidered stomacher, past the girdle at her waist, over the thick skirt of her gown at the front as if he would pat her sex, shielded by petticoats, as if he would touch her like a whore. Still the princess did not stop him, still she did not step back from him. She stood stock-still pressed against this man with his one hand around her waist, pulling her close to him as if she were a loose-lived maid who would offer a squeeze and a kiss. She did not resist even when his hand went down the front of her gown, to her very crotch beneath her petticoats, and then round her back to take hold of her buttocks in his hand, then he slid his other hand down from her waist, so that he was embracing her, so that he had her arse in both hands, as if she were his own woman.