“Soon?” I asked, aghast.

“Ask her yourself-” He broke off and nodded to the door to the presence chamber. It swung open and the queen came out. She gave a genuine smile of pleasure to see me and I went forward and dropped to my knee before her.

“Hannah!”

“Your Grace,” I said. “I am glad to see you again.”

A shadow crossed her face. “You have come from the Tower?”

“As you commanded,” I said quickly.

She nodded. “I do not want to know how she does.”

At the cold look in her face I kept my lips together and bowed my head.

She nodded at my obedience. “You can come with me. We are going riding.”

I fell in among her train. There were two or three new faces, ladies and gentlemen, but for a queen’s court they were very soberly dressed, and for young people out on a ride for pleasure, they were very quiet. This had become an uneasy court.

I waited till we were all mounted and riding out of the city to the north, past the beautiful Southampton House and on to the open country, before I brought my horse up alongside the queen.

“Your Grace, may I stay with Elizabeth until…” I broke off. “Until the end?” I concluded.

“Do you love her so much?” she asked bitterly. “Are you hers now?”

“No,” I said. “I pity her, as you would if you would only see her.”

“I won’t see her,” she said firmly. “And I dare not pity her. But yes, you can keep her company. You are a good girl, Hannah, and I don’t forget that we rode into London together on that first day.” She glanced back. The streets of London were very different now, a gibbet on every corner, with a traitor hanging by the neck, and the carrion crows on every rooftop growing fat on good pickings. The stink in the city was like a plague wind, the smell of English treason. “I had great hopes then,” she said shortly. “They will return, I know it.”

“I am sure of it,” I said: empty words.

“When Philip of Spain comes we shall make many changes,” she assured me. “You will see then, things will be better.”

“He is to come soon?”

“This month.”

I nodded. It was the date of Elizabeth’s death sentence. He had sworn he would not come to England while the Protestant princess was alive. She had no more than two dozen days left to live.

“Your Grace,” I said tentatively. “My old master, Robert Dudley, is still in the Tower.”

“I know it,” Queen Mary said quietly. “Along with other traitors. I wish to hear of none of them. Those who have been found guilty must die to keep the country safe.”

“I know you will be just, and I know you will be merciful,” I prompted her.

“I certainly will be just,” she repeated. “But some, Elizabeth among them, have outworn mercy from me. She had better pray that she can receive it from God.”

And she touched her horse’s flank with her whip and the court broke into a canter and there was nothing more to be said.

Summer 1554

In the middle of May, the proposed month of the queen’s wedding, as the weather grew warmer, still the scaffold was not built for Elizabeth, still Philip of Spain did not come. Then, one day, there was a sudden change at the Tower. A Norfolk squire and his blue-liveried men marched into the Tower to make it their own. Elizabeth went from door to window, in a frenzy of fear, craning her head at the arrow-slit, peering through the keyhole of the door trying to see what was happening. Finally, she sent me out to ask if he had come to oversee her execution, and she asked the guard on the door if the scaffold was being built on the green. They swore it was not, but she sent me to look. She could trust nobody, she could never be at peace until she saw with her own eyes, and she would not be allowed to see.

“Trust me,” I said briefly.

She caught my hands in her own. “Swear you won’t lie to me,” she said. “I have to know if it is to be today. I have to prepare, I am not ready.” She bit her lip, which was already chapped and sore from a hundred nips. “I’m only twenty, Hannah, I am not ready to die tomorrow.”

I nodded, and went out. The green was empty, there were no sawn planks awaiting a carpenter. She was safe for another day. I stopped at the watergate and fell into conversation with one of the blue-liveried men. The gossip he told me sent me flying back to the princess.

“You’re saved,” I said briefly, coming in through the door of her cramped room. Kat Ashley looked up and made the sign of a cross, the old habit forced out of her by her fear.

Elizabeth, who had been kneeling up at the window, looking out at the circling seagulls, turned around, her face pale, her eyelids red. “What?”

“You’re to be released to Sir Henry Bedingfield,” I said. “And to go with him to Woodstock Palace.”

There was no leap of hope in her face. “And what then?”

“House arrest,” I said.

“I am not declared innocent? I am not received at court?”

“You’re not on trial and you’re not executed,” I pointed out. “And you’re away from the Tower. There are other prisoners still left here, in a worse state.”

“They will bury me at Woodstock,” she said. “This is a trick to get me away from the city so I can be forgotten. They will poison me when I am out of sight and bury me far from court.”

“If the queen wanted you dead she could have sent for a swordsman,” I said. “This is your freedom, or at least a part-freedom. I should have thought you would be glad.”

Elizabeth’s face was dull. “D’you know what my mother did to her mother?” she asked in a whisper. “She sent her to a house in the country, and then to another – a smaller meaner place, and then to another, even worse – until the poor woman was in a damp ruin at the end of the world and she died ill, without a physician, starving, with no money to buy food, and crying for her daughter who was not allowed to come to her. Queen Katherine died in poverty and hardship while her daughter was a servant in my nursery, waiting on me. Don’t you think that daughter remembers that? Isn’t that what will happen to me? Don’t you see this is Mary’s revenge? Don’t you see the absolute precision of it?”

“You’re young,” I said. “Anything could happen.”

“You know I get ill, you know that I never sleep. You know that I have lived my life on the edge of a knife ever since they accused me of bastardy when I was just two years old. I can’t survive neglect. I can’t survive poison, I can’t survive the assassin’s knife in the night. I don’t think I can survive loneliness and fear for much longer.”

“But Lady Elizabeth,” I pleaded with her. “You said to me, every moment you have is a moment you have won. When you leave here, you have won yourself another moment.”

“When I leave here I go to a secret and shameful death,” she said flatly. She turned from the window and went to her bed and knelt before it, putting her face in her hands against the embroidered coverlet. “If they killed me here at least I should have a name as a martyred princess, I would be remembered as another greater Jane. But they do not even have the courage to send me to the scaffold. They will come at me in secret and I will die in hiding.”

I knew I could not leave the Tower without trying to see Lord Robert. He was in the same quarters, tucked opposite the tower, with his family crest carved by his father and his brother in the mantelpiece. I thought it a melancholy room for him to live in, overlooking the green where they had been executed, his death place.

His guard had been doubled. I was searched before I was allowed to his door, and for the first time I was not left alone with him. My service to Elizabeth had tainted my reputation of loyalty to the queen.

When they swung open the door he was at his desk at the window, the evening sun was streaming hot in the window. He was reading, the pages of the little book tipped to the light. He turned in his seat as the door opened and looked to see who was coming in. When he saw me he smiled, a world-weary smile. I stepped into the room and took in the difference in him. He was heavier, his face puffed up with fatigue and boredom, his skin pale from his months of imprisonment, but his dark eyes were steady and his mouth twisted upward in what had once been his merry smile.