'Before I leave, Roger,' she'd declared on a previous visit, 'I’ll need your fairest mirror and, for every crack I see in my face-paint, I'll fine you ten pounds sterling. In gold!' she added, rolling her tongue round her carmine-painted lips.

Of course I paid. That's one thing about Elizabeth, never mind about 'fair heart in a woman's breast'. She's as hard as flint when it comes to money! Mind you, a great girl! Lovely lass! My Queen, my lord, my monarch, my mistress, and mother of our dear bastard son. God knows where that rogue is! Last time I heard he was in Spain trying to sell that noddle-pate, the Spanish King, a map of Eldorado, the silver city of the Aztecs.

Ah well, back to the story. On her last visit, Elizabeth looked in the mirror counting the cracks. She stared at me standing behind her.

‘You owe me more this time, Roger!' she -exclaimed. "However, promise to bring me the other mirror and I'll cancel the debt.'

I just shook my head. 'Madam, I do not know what you mean.'

Elizabeth turned, those eyes, black pebbles in her white, snowy face. She seized my wrist and pinched the skin most cruelly. ‘You know what I mean, Roger!' she hissed.

I'd just smile back and shake my head. She may well be my mistress, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, the greatest Queen in all the world, but I will not show her that mirror! That's kept in my secret storeroom in a coffer secured by seven locks. A terrible mirror! The one Catherine de Medici used in her Chamber of the Black Arts at Blois. Nostradamus gave it to her. You know, the man who could prophesy the future and see terrible, burning things falling from the sky. Once in Blois, pursued by an insane assassin, I fled to that chamber. I killed the assassin and stole the mirror. I saw the real power of that mirror. I shall not tell you what I glimpsed there. Those sinister secrets which swam out of a black mist, dreadful scenes from the future!