Summer 1548

      The girl, giggling and over-excited, was running in the sunlit garden, running away from her stepfather, but not so fast that he could not catch her. Her stepmother, seated in an arbour with Rosamund roses in bud all around her, caught sight of the fourteen-year-old girl and the handsome man chasing around the broad tree trunks on the smooth turf and smiled, determined to see only the best in both of them: the girl she was bringing up and the man she had adored for years.

      He snatched at the hem of the girl’s swinging gown and caught her up to him for a moment. ‘A forfeit!’ he said, his dark face close to her flushed cheeks.

      They both knew what the forfeit would be. Like quicksilver she slid from his grasp and dodged away, to the far side of an ornamental fountain with a broad circular bowl. Fat carp were swimming slowly in the water; Elizabeth’s excited face was reflected in the surface as she leaned forward to taunt him.

      ‘Can’t catch me!’

      ‘’Course I can.’

      She leaned low so that he could see her small breasts at the top of the square-cut green gown. She felt his eyes on her and the colour in her cheeks deepened. He watched, amused and aroused, as her neck flushed rosy pink.

      ‘I can catch you any time I want to,’ he said, thinking of the chase of sex that ends in bed.

      ‘Come on then!’ she said, not knowing exactly what she was inviting, but knowing that she wanted to hear his feet pounding the grass behind her, sense his hands outstretched to grab at her; and, more than anything else, to feel his arms around her, pulling her