“He was a good horse, wasn’t he?” I said with affected nonchalance. “Shall we ride him again tomorrow?”

Danny looked from the horse to me. “Yes,” he said decidedly.

I held him close to me and kissed his silky head. “We’ll do that then,” I said gently. “And we’ll let him go to bed now.”

My legs were weak beneath me as we walked from the stable yard, Danny at my side, his little hand reaching up to hold mine. I could feel myself smiling, though tears were running down my cheeks. Danny would speak, Danny would grow up as a normal child. I had saved him from death in Calais, and I had brought him to life in England. I had justified the trust of his mother, and perhaps one day I would be able to tell his father that I had kept his son safe for love of him, and for love of the child. It seemed wonderful to me that his first word should be: “good.” Perhaps it was a foreseeing. Perhaps life would be good for my son Danny.

For a little while the queen seemed better, away from the city. She walked by the river with me in the mornings or in the evenings; she could not tolerate the brightness of midday. But Hampton Court was filled with ghosts. It was on these paths and in these gardens where she had walked with Philip when they were newly married and Cardinal Pole newly come from Rome and the whole of Christendom stretched before them. It was here that she had whispered to him that she was with child, and gone into her first confinement, certain of her happiness, confident of having a son. And it was here that she came out from her confinement, childless and ill, and saw Elizabeth growing in beauty and exulting in her triumph, another step closer to the throne.

“I feel no better here at all,” she said to me one day as Jane Dormer and I came in to say goodnight. She had gone to bed early again, almost doubled-up with pain from the ache in her belly and feverishly hot. “We will go to St. James’s Palace next week. We will spend Christmas there. The king likes St. James’s.”

Jane Dormer and I exchanged one silent glance. We did not think that King Philip would come home to his wife for Christmas when he had not come home when she had lost their child, when he had not come home when she wrote to him that she was so sick that she did not see how to bear to live.

As we had feared it was a depleted court at St. James’s Palace. My Lord Robert had bigger and better rooms not because his star was rising, but simply because there were fewer men at court. I saw him at dinner on some days but generally he was at Hatfield, where the princess kept a merry circle about her and a constant stream of visitors flocked to her door.

They were not always playing games at the old palace either. They were planning how the country would be ruled by the princess when she came to her throne. And if I knew Elizabeth, and my Lord Robert, they would be wondering how soon it might be.

Lord Robert saw me only rarely; but he had not forgotten me. He came looking for me, one day in September. “I have done you a great favor, I think,” he said with his charming smile. “Are you still in love with your husband, Mrs. Carpenter? Or shall we abandon him in Calais?”

“You have news of him?” I asked. I put my hand down and felt Danny’s hand creep into my own.

“I might have,” he said provocatively. “But you have not answered my question. Do you want him home in England, or shall we forget all about him?”

“I cannot jest about this, and especially not before his son,” I said. “I want him home, my lord. Please tell me, do you have news of him?”

“His name is on this list.” He flicked the paper at me. “Soldiers to be ransomed, townspeople who are to be returned to England. The whole of the English Pale outside Calais is to come home. If the queen can find some money in the Treasury we can get them all back where they belong.”

I could feel my heart thudding. “There is no money in the Treasury,” I said. “The country is all but ruined.”

He shrugged. “There is money to keep the fleet waiting to escort the king home. There is money for his adventures abroad. Mention it to her as she dresses for dinner tonight, and I will speak with her after dinner.”

I waited until the queen had dragged herself up from her bed and was seated before her mirror, her maid behind her brushing her hair. Jane Dormer, who was usually such a fierce guardian of the queen’s privacy, had taken the fever herself, and was lying down. It was just the queen and I and some unimportant girl from the Norfolk family.

“Your Grace,” I said simply. “I have had news of my husband.”

She turned her dull gaze on me. “I had forgotten you are married. Is he alive?”

“Yes,” I said. “He is among the English men and women hoping to be ransomed out of Calais.”

She was only slightly more interested. “Who is arranging this?”

“Lord Robert. His men have been held captive too.”

The queen sighed and turned her head away. “Are they asking very much?”

“I don’t know,” I said frankly.

“I will speak with Lord Robert,” she said, as if she were very weary. “I will do what I can for you and your husband, Hannah.”

I knelt before her. “Thank you, Your Grace.”

When I looked up I saw that she was exhausted. “I wish I could bring my husband home so easily,” she said. “But I don’t believe he will ever come home to me again.”

The queen was too ill to transact the business herself, the fever was always worse after dinner and she could barely breathe for coughing; but she scrawled an assent on a bill on the Treasury for money and Lord Robert assured me that the business would go through. We met in the stable yard, he was riding to Hatfield and in a hurry to be off.

“Will he come to you here at court?” he asked casually.

I hesitated, I had not thought of the details of our meeting. “I suppose so,” I said. “I should leave a message for him at his old house, and at my old shop in Fleet Street.”

I said nothing more, but a deeper worry was starting to dawn on me. What if Daniel’s love for me had not grown, like mine, in absence? What if he had decided that I was dead and that he should make a new life elsewhere in Italy or France as he had so often said? Worse than that: what if he thought I had run away with Lord Robert and chosen a life of shame without him? What if he had cast me off?

“Can I get a message to him as he is released?” I asked.

Lord Robert shook his head. “You will have to trust that he will come and find you,” he said cheerfully. “Is he the faithful type of man?”

I thought of his years of steady waiting for me, and how he had watched me come to my love of him, and how he had let me go and return to him. “Yes,” I said shortly.

Lord Robert sprang up into the saddle. “If you see John Dee would you tell him that Princess Elizabeth wants that map of his,” he said.

“Why would she want a map?” I asked, immediately suspicious.

Lord Robert winked at me. He leaned from his horse and spoke very low. “If the queen dies without naming Elizabeth as her heir then we may have a battle on our hands.”

His horse shifted and I stepped back quickly. “Oh no,” I said. “Not again.”

“No fight with the people of England,” he assured me. “They want the Protestant princess. But with the Spanish king. D’you think he’d let such a prize slip away if he thought he could come over and claim it for himself?”

“You are arming and planning for war again?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Why else would I want my soldiers back?” he demanded. “Thank you for your help with that, Hannah.”

I choked on my shock. “My lord!”

He patted the horse’s neck and tightened the rein. “It’s always a coil,” he said simply. “And you are always in it, Hannah. You cannot live with a queen and not be enmeshed in a dozen plots. You live in a snake pit and I tell you frankly, you have not the aptitude for it. Now go to her. I hear she is worse.”