He nodded. “I’ll take your secret with me to the scaffold if I go that way,” he promised. “You have nothing to fear from me, child. And I have told no one who you were or where you came from.”

I nodded. When I looked up he was watching me, his dark eyes warm. “You’ve grown, Mistress Boy,” he remarked. “Soon be a woman. I shall be sorry not to see it.”

I had nothing to say. I stood dumbly before him. He smiled as if he knew only too well the churn of my emotions. “Ah, little fool. I should have left you in your father’s shop that day, and not drawn you into this.”

“My father told me to bid you farewell.”

“Aye, he is right. You can leave me now. I will release you from your promise to love me. You are no longer my vassal. I let you go.”

It was little more than a joke to him. He knew as well as I did that you cannot release a girl from her promise to love a man. She either gets herself free or she is bound for life.

“I’m not free,” I whispered. “My father told me to come to see you and to say good-bye. But I am not free. I never will be.”

“Would you serve me still?”

I nodded.

Lord Robert smiled and leaned forward, his mouth so close to my ear that I could feel the warmth of his breath. “Then do this one last thing for me. Go to Lady Elizabeth. Bid her be of good cheer. Tell her to study with my old tutor, John Dee. Tell her to seek him out, and study with him, without fail. Then find John Dee and tell him two things. One: I think he should make contact with his old master, Sir William Pickering. Got that?”

“Yes,” I said. “Sir William. I know of him.”

“And two: tell him to meet also with James Crofts and Tom Wyatt. I think they are engaged in an alchemical experiment that is near to John Dee’s heart. Edward Courtenay can make a chemical wedding. Can you remember all of that?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t know what it means.”

“All the better. They are to make gold from the basest of metal, and cast down silver to ash. Tell him that. He’ll know what I mean. And tell him that I will play my part in the alchemy, if he will get me there.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Just remember the message,” he said. “Tell it back to me.”

I repeated it, word for word, and he nodded. “And finally, come back to me just once, for one last time, and tell me what you can see in John Dee’s mirror. I need to know. Whatever becomes of me, I need to know what will happen to England.”

I nodded, but he did not let me go at once. He put his lips to my neck, just below my ear, a little brush of a kiss, a little breath of a kiss. “You’re a good girl,” he said. “And I thank you.”

He let me go then, and I stepped back, backward and backward from him as if I could not bear to turn away. I tapped on the door behind me, and the guard swung it open. “God bless you and keep you safe, my lord,” I said. Lord Robert turned his head and gave me a smile which was so sweet that it broke my heart even as the door closed and hid him from me.

“God speed, lad,” he replied evenly, to the closing door, and then it was shut and I was in the darkness and the cold and without him once more.

In the street outside I took to my heels and started to run home. A shadow suddenly stepped out of a doorway and blocked my way. I gasped in alarm.

“Hush, it’s me, Daniel.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I went to your father’s shop and he told me you were taking books into the Tower for Lord Robert.”

“Oh.”

He fell into step beside me. “Surely you don’t need to serve him now.”

“No,” I said. “He has released me.” I very much wished that Daniel would go away so that I could think of the kiss on my neck and the warmth of Lord Robert’s breath against my ear.

“So you won’t serve him again,” he said pedantically.

“I just said,” I snapped. “I am not serving him now. I am delivering books for my father. It just happened to be to Lord Robert. I did not even see him. I just took them in and gave them to a guard.”

“Then when did he release you from his service?”

“Months ago,” I lied, trying to recover.

“When he was arrested?”

I rounded on him. “What does it matter to you? I am released from his service, I serve Queen Mary now. What more d’you need to know?”

His temper rose with mine. “I have a right to know everything that you do. You are to be my wife, your name will be mine. And while you insist on running from court to Tower, you put yourself into danger, and the rest of us into danger too.”

“You’re in no danger,” I retorted. “What would you know of it? You’ve never done anything or been anywhere. The world has turned upside down and back again while you have stayed safe at home. Why should you be in danger?”

“I’ve not played off one master against another, and shown a false face and spied and given false witness, if that’s what you mean,” he said sharply. “I did not ever think those were great and admirable acts. I have kept my faith and buried my father according to my faith. I have supported my mother and my sisters, and I have saved money against the day of my marriage. Our marriage. While you run around the dark streets, dressed as a pageboy, serve in a Papist court, visit a condemned traitor, and reproach me for having done nothing.”

I pulled my hand away from him. “Don’t you see he’s going to die?” I shouted, and then I was aware that the tears were streaming down my face. Angrily, I rubbed them away with my sleeve. “Don’t you know that they’re going to execute him and no one can save him? Or at best they’ll leave him in there to wait and wait and wait and die of waiting? He can’t even save himself? Don’t you see that everyone I love seems to be taken from me, for no crime? With no way of saving them? Don’t you think I miss my mother every day of my life? Don’t you think I smell smoke every night in my dreams and now this man… this man…” I broke off in tears.

Daniel caught me by the shoulders, not in an embrace, but with a firm grip to hold me at arm’s length so that he could read my face with a long, impartial, measuring glance. “This man is nothing to do with the death of your mother,” he said flatly. “Nothing to do with someone dying for their faith. So don’t dress up your lust as sorrow. You have been serving two masters, sworn enemies. One of them was bound to end up in there. If it was not Lord Robert then it would have been Queen Mary. One of them was bound to triumph, one of them was bound to die.”

I wrenched myself from his grip, pulling away from his hard unsympathetic eyes, and started to trudge for home. After a few moments I heard him come after me.

“Would you be weeping like this if it had been Queen Mary in there, with her head on the block?” he asked.

“Ssshhh,” I said, always cautious. “Yes.”

He said nothing, but his silence showed his great skepticism.

“I have done nothing dishonorable,” I said flatly.

“I doubt you,” he said, as coldly as me. “If you have been honorable it has only been for lack of opportunity.”

“Whoreson,” I said under my breath so he could not hear, and he marched me home in silence and we parted at my doorway with a handshake which was neither cousinly nor loving. I let him go, I would have been glad to throw a large volume at his retreating upright head. Then I went in to my father and wondered how long it would be before Daniel came to see him to say that he wanted to be released from our betrothal, and what would happen to me then.

As fool to the queen I was expected to be in her chambers every day, at her side. But as soon as I could be absent for an hour without attracting notice, I took a chance, and went to the old Dudley rooms to look for John Dee. I tapped on the door and a man in strange livery opened it and looked suspiciously at me.

“I thought the Dudley household lived here,” I said timidly.