She threw back her head and laughed, a loud genuine laugh. “You’ve learned well,” she said. “I only hope you get as much joy from these skills as I do.”

“But what profit?” I asked.

The glance Elizabeth shot me was one of acute calculation. “Some amusement,” she conceded. “And real profit. You and I have slept safer in our beds because the king is in love with me, Hannah. And my path to the throne has been a little clearer since the most powerful man in the world swore he would support me.”

“You have his promise?” I asked, amazed at her.

She nodded. “Oh, yes. My sister is betrayed more deeply than she knows. Half her country is in love with me, and now her husband too. My advice to you, as you go to your husband, is never to trust him and never love him more than he loves you.”

I shook my head, smiling. “I mean to be a good wife,” I said. “He is a good man. I mean to leave this court and go to him and become a good and steady wife to him.”

“Ah, you can’t be that,” she said bluntly. “You’re not a woman grown yet. You’re afraid of your own power. You’re afraid of his desire. You’re afraid of your own desire. You’re afraid of being a woman.”

I said nothing, though it was the truth.

“Oh, go then, little fool. But when you are bored, and you will be bored, you can come back to me again. I like having you in my service.”

I bowed and took myself off to the queen’s rooms.

The moment I opened the door I knew that there was something wrong. My first thought was that Queen Mary was ill, somehow fatally ill and yet not attended. The room was empty of her women, she was all but alone. The room was gloomy; with the shutters closed, it was cold, as the summer heat did not penetrate the thick walls. She was crouched on the floor, doubled-up, folded over her knees, her forehead pressed on the cold hearthstone at the empty fireside. Only Jane Dormer was with her, seated in the shadows behind her, in stubborn silence. When I went to the queen and knelt before her I saw her face was wet with tears.

“Your Grace!”

“Hannah, he is leaving me,” she said.

I shot a bemused look at Jane and she scowled at me, as if I were to blame.

“Leaving you?”

“He is going to the Low Countries. Hannah, he is leaving me… leaving me.”

I took her hands. “Your Grace…”

Her eyes were sightless, filled with tears, fixed on the empty hearth. “He is leaving me,” she said.

I went over to Jane Dormer, stabbing her needle into a linen shirt in the window seat. “How long has she been like this?”

“Since he told her his news, this morning,” she said coldly. “He sent her ladies away when she started screaming that her heart would break, then, when he could not stop her weeping, he left too. He has not come back, and they have not come back.”

“Has she not eaten? Have you brought her nothing?”

She glared at me. “He has broken her heart, as you predicted,” she said flatly. “Don’t you remember it? I do. When I brought her the portrait and I was so hopeful and she was so taken with him. You said he would break her heart and he has done so. Him with his baby that was there and then gone, him with his Spanish lords longing to go and fight the French, and forever complaining about England. Now he has told her he is going to war against the French, but not when he will come back; and she can say nothing but that he is leaving, leaving her. And she cries as if she would die of grief.”

“Shouldn’t we get her to bed?”

“Why?” she demanded. “He won’t come to her in bed for lust, if he won’t come here for pity, and his presence is the only thing that will help her.”

“Mistress Jane, we cannot just sit here and see her cry and cry like this.”

“What would you have us do?” she asked. “Her happiness is given over to a man who does not care enough for her to stay when she has lost his baby and has lost the love of her people for him. A man who does not have enough common pity to give her a word of comfort. We cannot heal this hurt with a cup of warm ale and a brick beneath her feet.”

“Well let’s get her that, at least,” I said, falling on the suggestion.

“You get it,” she said. “I’m not leaving her alone. This is a woman who could die of loneliness.”

I went to the queen and knelt beside her where she keened, soundlessly, her forehead knocking against the hearthstone as she rocked forward and back. “Your Grace, I’m going down to the kitchen, can I bring you anything to eat or drink?”

She sat back on her heels but did not look at me. Her forehead was bloody where she had grazed it against the stone. Her gaze remained fixed on the empty hearth; but she put out her cold little hand and took mine. “Don’t leave me,” she said. “Not you as well. He’s leaving me, you know, Hannah. He just told me. He’s leaving me, and I don’t know how I can bear to live.”

Dear Father,

Thank you for your blessing in your letter to me. I am glad that you are well and that the shop in Calais is doing so well. I should have been glad to obey your command and come to you at once but when I went to the queen for permission to leave her service I found her so ill that I cannot leave her, at least for this month. The king has set sail for the Lowlands, and she cannot be happy without him, she is quite desolate. We have come to Greenwich and it is like a court in mourning. I will stay with her until he returns which he has promised, on his word of honor, will be very soon. When he comes back I shall come to you without delay. I hope this is agreeable to you, Father, and that you will explain to Daniel and to his mother that I would prefer to be with them, but that I feel it is my duty to stay with the queen at this time of her great unhappiness.

I send you my love and duty and hope to see you soon -

Your Hannah

Dear Daniel,

Forgive me, I cannot come yet. The queen is in a despair so great that I dare not leave her. The king has left and she is clinging to all her other friends. She is so bereft that I fear for her mind. Forgive me, love, I will come as soon as I can. He has sworn it is a brief absence, merely to protect his interests in the Low Countries and so we expect him back within the month. September or October at the latest, I will be able to come to you. I want to be your wife, indeed I do.

Hannah

Autumn 1555

The queen retreated into a private world of silent misery in the palace that had been the happiest of them all: Greenwich. Parting with the king had been an agony for her. Like a man, he had hidden from her despair in the elaborate formality of leave-taking, he had made sure they were always attended so she could not cry over him in private. He engineered it so that she said good-bye to him like a doll queen: one whose hands and feet and mouth were worked by an indifferent puppetmaster. When he was finally gone it was as if the strings were cut and she dropped to the floor, all disjointed.

Elizabeth had slid away from him with a smile which suggested to some that she had a better idea of when he would come back to England than his own wife, and was reassured by his plans. He had the decency not to hold her close on parting, but when he boarded ship and leaned over the side and waved, he kissed his hand and it was a gesture directed ambiguously: toward the princess, and the heartbroken queen.

The queen kept to her darkened rooms and would be served only by Jane Dormer or me, and the court became a place of ghosts, haunted by her unhappiness. The few Spanish courtiers left behind by their king were desperate to join him, their anxiety to leave made us all feel that the English marriage had been nothing but an interlude in their real lives, and a mistake, at that. When they applied to the queen for permission to join him she flew into a frenzy of jealousy, swearing that they were going because they secretly knew that there was no point waiting for him in England. She screamed at them, and they bowed and fled from her fury. Her ladies scuttled from the room or pressed themselves back against their seats, trying to hear and see nothing, and only Jane and I went to her, begging her to be calm. She was beside herself, while the storm lasted Jane and I had to cling to her arms to stop her beating her head against the paneled walls of her privy chamber. She was a woman deranged by her passion for him, driven by her conviction that she had lost him forever.