'Shallot,' he bellowed, 'you'll either die by hanging or die of the pox!'

'That, sir,' I coldly replied, 'depends on whether I embrace your principles or your wife.'

Well, the chamber was in an uproar. I refused to apologise to the Speaker so the Serjeant-at-arms hustled me to the Tower. Elizabeth (because I had been defending her) came to visit me. She insisted on seeing me alone, and you know Shallot! A cup of wine and a pretty girl in an empty room and anything could happen. On that occasion it certainly did! In her younger days Elizabeth was a passionate girl. She had a cloying sensuousness and, like her mother, Anne Boleyn, she could ride anything. (I see my chaplain snigger so a quick rap across the knuckles reminds him to keep his mouth shut and his thoughts clean about his betters.)

Ah, poison, the subtle murderer of my dreams. Well, I have now marshalled my thoughts, summoning memories from that summer over seventy years ago. Oh, Lord, it seems only yesterday when I and my master, Benjamin Daunbey, nephew to the great Cardinal Wolsey, were sent to the Chateau de Maubisson outside Paris to resolve certain mysteries. Ah, I have mentioned his name! Benjamin, with his long, dark face, kindly eyes and lawyer's stoop. When I think of him I always smile. He was one of the few really good men I have ever met. If you have read my earlier memoirs you will know how this occurred. We went to school together, I saved him from a beating and he rescued me from a hanging, twice; once in Ipswich and then again at Montfaucon, that great forest of gibbets which stands near the Porte St Denis in Paris. Now, Benjamin's uncle, the great Wolsey, and his black familiar, the enigmatic Doctor Agrippa, used us both on countless errands in the sinister twilight world of treason, murder and lechery of the courts of Europe. Lackaday, they have all gone now! They're just shadows, ghosts who dance under the shade of the spreading yew trees which border the far end of the lawn in front of my manor house.