Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008

This edition published by Harper 2017

Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 2008

Cover design and illustration: Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover image © Blairs Museum, Aberdeen, Scotland / Bridgeman Images (portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, c.1575, English School).

Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007192144

Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780007380176

Version: 2017-01-23

Dedication

For Anthony

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1568, Autumn, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: Bess

1568, Autumn, Hampton Court: George

1568, Winter, Bolton Castle: Mary

1568, Winter, Chatsworth: Bess

1568, Winter, Hampton Court: George

1568, Winter, Bolton Castle: Mary

1568, Winter, Chatsworth House: Bess

1568, Winter, Hampton Court: George

1568, Winter, Bolton Castle: Mary

1568, Winter, Bolton Castle: George

1568–9, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1569, January, on the journey from Bolton Castle to Tutbury Castle: George

1569, January, on the journey from Bolton Castle to Tutbury Castle: Mary

1569, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1569, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1569, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1569, Spring, Tutbury Castle: George

1569, Spring, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1569, Spring, Tutbury Castle: George

1569, Spring, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1569, Spring, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1569, Spring, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1569, April, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1569, May, Wingfield Manor: George

1569, May, Wingfield Manor: Bess

1569, May, Wingfield Manor: Mary

1569, June, Wingfield Manor: Bess

1569, August, Wingfield Manor: Mary

1569, August, Wingfield Manor: Bess

1569, August, Wingfield Manor: Mary

1569, September, Wingfield Manor: George

1569, September, Wingfield Manor: Bess

1569, September, Wingfield Manor: George

1569, September, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1569, October, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1569, October, Tutbury Castle: George

1569, October, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1569, October, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1569, October, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1569, November, Tutbury Castle: George

1569, November, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1569, November, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1569, November, on the road from Tutbury Castle: Bess

1569, November, on the road from Tutbury Castle: Mary

1569, November, Ashby-de-la-Zouche Castle: Bess

1569, November, Ashby-de-la-Zouche Castle: George

1569, November, Coventry: Mary

1569, November, Coventry: Bess

1569, November, Coventry: George

1569, Christmas Eve, Coventry: Mary

1569, December, Coventry: Bess

1569, December, Coventry: George

1569, December, Coventry: Mary

1569, December, Coventry: George

1569, December, Coventry: Mary

1569, December, Coventry: Bess

1569, December, Coventry: George

1569, December, Coventry: Bess

1570, January, Tutbury Castle: George

1570, January, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1570, January, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1570, January, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1570, January, Tutbury Castle: George

1570, January, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1570, January, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1570, January, Windsor Castle: George

1570, January, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1570, January, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1570, January, Tutbury Castle: George

1570, February, Tutbury Castle: Bess

1570, February, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1570, April, Tutbury Castle: George

1570, May, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1570, May, Chatsworth: Bess

1570, May, on the road to Chatsworth: Mary

1570, June, Chatsworth: George

1570, June, Chatsworth: Bess

1570, June, Chatsworth: Mary

1570, June, Chatsworth: George

1570, August, Wingfield Manor: Mary

1570, September, Chatsworth: Bess

1570, September, Chatsworth: Mary

1570, October, Chatsworth: Bess

1570, October, Chatsworth: Mary

1570, Winter, Sheffield Castle: George

1571, February, Sheffield Castle: Bess

1571, February, Sheffield Castle: Mary

1571, March, Sheffield Castle: George

1571, March, on the road from Sheffield Castle to Tutbury: Bess

1571, April, Tutbury Castle: George

1571, August, Tutbury Castle: Mary

1571, September, Sheffield Castle: Bess

1571, September, Sheffield Castle: George

1571, October, Sheffield Castle: Bess

1571, November, Sheffield Castle: Mary

1571, December, Sheffield Castle: George

1571, December, Chatsworth: Mary

1572, January, Cold Harbour House, London: George

1572, January, Sheffield Castle: Bess

1572, January, Sheffield Castle: Mary

January 16th, 1572, Westminster Hall, London: George

1572, January, Sheffield Castle: Bess

1572, January, Sheffield Castle: Mary

1572, January, London: George

1572, January, Sheffield Castle: Mary

1572, March, Chatsworth: Bess

June 1st, 1572, London: George

February 8th, 1587, Hardwick Hall: Bess

Bibliography

Author’s Note

Discover More of Philippa Gregory’s Tudor Novels

Gardens for The Gambia

About the Author

Also by Philippa Gregory

About the Publisher

1568, Autumn, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: Bess

Every woman should marry for her own advantage since her husband will represent her, as visible as her front door, for the rest of his life. If she chooses a wastrel she will be avoided by all her neighbours as a poor woman; catch a duke and she will be Your Grace, and everyone will be her friend. She can be pious, she can be learned, she can be witty and wise and beautiful; but if she is married to a fool she will be ‘that poor Mrs Fool’ until the day he dies.

And I have good reason to respect my own opinion in the matter of husbands having had three of them, and each one, God bless him, served as stepping stone to the next until I got my fourth, my earl, and I am now ‘my lady Countess of Shrewsbury’: a rise greater than that of any woman I know. I am where I am today by making the most of myself, and getting the best price for what I could bring to market. I am a self-made woman – self-made, self-polished and self-sold – and proud of it.

Indeed, no woman in England has done better than me. For though we have a queen on the throne, she is only there by the skill of her mother, and the feebleness of her father’s other stock, and not through any great gifts of her own. If you kept a Tudor for a breeder you would eat him for meat in your second winter. They are poor weak beasts, and this Tudor queen must make up her mind to wed, bed and breed, or the country will be ruined.

If she does not give us a bonny Protestant boy then she will abandon us to disaster, for her heir is another woman: a young woman, a vain woman, a sinful woman, an idolatrous Papist woman, God forgive her errors, and save us from the destruction she will bring us. Some days you hear one story of Mary Queen of Scots, some days another. What you will never, never hear, even if you listen a hundred times, even when the story is told by her adoring admirers, is the story of a woman who consults her own interest, thinks for herself, and marries for her best advantage. But since in this life a woman is a piece of property, she does well to consider her improvement, her sale at the best price and her future ownership. What else? Shall she let herself tumble down?

A pity that such a foolish young woman should be foisted on me and my household, even for a short stay, while Her Majesty Elizabeth the Queen decides what is to be done with this most awkward guest. But no house in the kingdom can be trusted to entertain and – yes – secure her like mine. No husband in England could be trusted with such a Salome dancing on his terrace but mine. Only my household is run with such discipline that we can accommodate a queen of royal blood in the style that she commands and with the safety that she must have. Only my newly wedded husband is so dotingly fond of me that he is safe under the same roof as such a temptress.

No-one knows of this arrangement yet; it has been decided in secret by my good friend Secretary William Cecil and by me. As soon as this hopeless queen arrived in rags at Whitehaven, driven from Scotland by her rebellious lords, Cecil sent me a short note by an unknown messenger to ask if I would house her, and I sent him a one-word reply: yes. Yes indeed! I am honoured by Cecil’s faith in me. From such trust comes great challenges, and from great challenges come great rewards. This new world of Elizabeth’s is for those who can see their chances and take them. I foresee honours and riches if we can host this royal cousin and keep her close. Cecil can rely on me. I shall guard her and befriend her, I shall house and feed her, I shall treat her royally and honourably and keep her safe as a little bird in the nest till the moment of his choosing, when I will hand her over intact to his hangman.

1568, Autumn, Hampton Court: George

I am nobody’s agent. I am no bought opinion. I am no hired blade. I am neither Cecil’s spy nor executioner. I wish to God that I were not here in London, on this bad business, but home at Chatsworth House with my darling innocent wife Bess, in the simple country and far away from the conspiracies and perils of court. I can’t say that I am happy. I can’t say that I like this. But I will do my duty – God knows that I always do my duty.

‘You have been summoned for nothing but to order the death of Mary Queen of Scots,’ Thomas Howard hisses in my ear as he catches up with me in a gallery at Hampton Court. They have closed the shutters for cleaning and the place is shadowy in the early-evening dusk. The portraits on the walls seem to show pale-faced listeners leaning forward to hear as Howard takes my arm to warn me of dangers that I already fear.

‘We are to throw suspicion on her. Nothing else. Don’t deceive yourself. Cecil decided that this queen was a threat to the kingdom, from the moment of her birth. She may think that she has escaped her enemies in Scotland to sanctuary in England; but she has just exchanged one danger for another. Cecil has decided that she must die. This is his third attempt to convict her. We are to be his hangmen, without opinions of our own.’

I look down at Howard; he is a small man, well-dressed and neat with a well-trimmed black beard and bright dark eyes. Today he is almost dancing with fury at the queen’s minister. We all resent Cecil, all us old lords; but it rubs Howard worse than any other. He is the queen’s cousin, the head of the Howard family, he is the Duke of Norfolk, he would expect to be her chief advisor – but she depends on Cecil and always has done.

‘I have been appointed by the queen herself to inquire into the conduct of her cousin the Queen of Scots. I am no hangman,’ I say with quiet dignity. A man goes past, and hesitates as if to listen to our conversation.

Howard shakes his dark head at my naivety. ‘Elizabeth may want the Queen of Scots’ name cleared. But William Cecil is not notorious for his soft heart. He wants the Protestant faith to rule Scotland as England, and the Catholic queen to lie in jail, or in her coffin. Either suits him equally well. He will never agree that she is guilty of nothing and must be restored to her throne.’

I cannot argue against Howard’s irritable righteousness. I know that he is speaking only the truth. But he is speaking it too loud and too clear for my liking. Anyone could be behind the tapestry screens, and though the stranger has strolled on, he must have heard some of this.

‘Hush,’ I say and draw him to a seat so that we can whisper. At once we look like conspirators, but the whole court looks like conspirators or spies these days. ‘What can we do?’ I ask him quietly. ‘Cecil has called this inquiry to hear the evidence against the Scots queen, to judge whether she should be restored to her throne, whether she is fit to rule. What can we do to make sure that she is treated justly?’

‘We have to save her,’ Howard says firmly. ‘We have to declare her innocent of murdering her husband, and we have to restore her to her throne in Scotland. We have to accept her claim to be Elizabeth’s heir. She must be confirmed as heir to the throne of England when …’ He breaks off. Not even Howard dares mention the death of his cousin the queen. ‘When the time comes. Only the confirmed inheritance of Mary Stuart will give us the safety of knowing our next monarch. We have a right to know the heir. We have to fight her cause as if it were our own.’

He sees my hesitation. A couple of men go by and look curiously at the two of us. I feel conspicuous and get to my feet.

‘Walk with me,’ Howard says. ‘And listen. We have to fight her cause as if it were our own because it is our own. Say that we let Cecil imprison her, or trump up a charge of murder and accuse her. What do you think happens then?’

I wait.

‘What if next he decides that I am a danger to the kingdom? What then? What if after me, he names you?’

I try to laugh. ‘He is hardly likely to accuse you, or me. We are the greatest men in England. I am the greatest landowner north of the Trent and you are the queen’s own cousin and a duke.’

‘Yes. And that is why we are in danger. We are his rivals for power. He will destroy anyone who challenges him. Today the Queen of Scots faces his tribunal. Tomorrow it could be me, or any that have dared to challenge him: Percy, Dacre, Sussex, Arundel, Dudley, the Northern lords, you. He has to be stopped,’ Howard says, his voice a low rumble in my ear. ‘Wouldn’t you stop him if you could?’

‘It can’t be done,’ I say cautiously. ‘The queen is free to choose her own advisors, and she trusts him like no other. He has been at her side since she was a young princess. What could we accuse him of?’

‘Stealing Spanish gold! Pushing them to the brink of war! Making an enemy of France! Driving half the country towards treason with his constant suspicion and spying on people who want nothing more than to worship in the old way! Look at the court! Have you ever been at court before and felt yourself so fearful? It is filled with spies and plots.’

I nod. It is undeniable. Cecil’s fear of Papists and his hatred of foreigners stalk England.

‘This last idiocy of his is the worst,’ Howard says furiously. ‘That a ship should take refuge from bad weather in our port and be seized! He makes us a nation of pirates and the seas unsafe for our shipping.’

I can’t disagree. The Spanish treasure ship was blown into Plymouth expecting sanctuary, and Cecil, the son of a poor man, could not resist the gold it carried. He stole the gold – simple as that. And now the Spanish are threatening a blockade of trade, even war, if we do not pay it back. We are utterly in the wrong, all because Cecil is utterly in the wrong; but he has the ear of the Queen of England.

Howard masters his irritation with some difficulty. ‘Please God we never see the day when you come to me and say I was right to fear him and we should have defended ourselves, but now it is too late and one of our own is on trial for some trumped-up charge. Please God he does not pick us off one by one and we too trusting to defend ourselves.’ He pauses. ‘His is a rule of terror. He makes us afraid of imaginary enemies so we don’t guard ourselves against him and against our government. We are so busy watching for foreigners that we forget to watch our friends. Anyway, you keep your counsel and I’ll keep mine. I’ll say no more against Cecil for now. You will keep this close? Not a word?’

The look he gives me persuades me, more than any argument. If the only duke in England, cousin to the queen herself, should fear his own words being reported to a man who should be little more than a royal servant, it proves that the servant has become overmighty. We are all growing afraid of Cecil’s knowledge, of Cecil’s network of intelligencers, of Cecil’s growing silent power.

‘This is between the two of us,’ I say quietly. I glance around to see that no-one is in earshot. It is amazing to me that I, England’s greatest earl, and Howard, England’s only duke, should fear eavesdroppers. But so it is. This is what England has become in this tenth year of Elizabeth’s reign: a place where a man is afraid of his own shadow. And in these last ten years, my England seems to have filled with shadows.

1568, Winter, Bolton Castle: Mary

I refuse, I utterly refuse to wear anything but my own gowns. My beautiful gowns, my furs, my fine lace collars, my velvets, my petticoats of cloth of gold were all left behind in Holyroodhouse, dusted with scented powder and hung in muslin bags in the wardrobe rooms. I wore armour when I rode out with Bothwell to teach my rebel lords a lesson, but it turned out I was neither teacher nor queen, for they beat me, arrested me and hunted Bothwell down for an outlaw. They imprisoned me and I would have died in Lochleven Castle if I had not escaped by my own wits. Now, in England, they think I am brought so low as to wear hand-me-downs. They think I am sufficiently humbled to be glad of Elizabeth’s cast-off gowns.

They must be mad if they think that they can treat me as an ordinary woman. I am no ordinary woman. I am half divine. I have a place of my own, a unique place, between the angels and nobles. In heaven are God, Our Lady and Her Son, and below them, like courtiers, the angels in their various degrees. On earth, as in heaven, there are the king, the queen and princes; below them are nobles, gentry, working people and paupers. At the very lowest, just above the beasts, are poor women: women without homes, husbands, or fortune.

And I? I am two things at once: the second highest being in the world, a queen; and the very lowest: a woman without home, husband, or fortune. I am a queen three times over because I was born Queen of Scotland, daughter to King James V of Scotland, I was married to the Dauphin of France and inherited the French crown with him, and I am, in my own right, the only true and legitimate heir to the throne of England, being the great-grandniece to King Henry VIII of England, though his bastard daughter, Elizabeth, has usurped my place.

But, voilà! At the same time I am the lowest of all things, a poor woman without a husband to give her a name or protection, because my husband the King of France lived for no more than a year after our coronation, my kingdom of Scotland has mounted an evil rebellion against me and forced me out, and my claim to the throne of England is denied by the shameless red-haired bastard Elizabeth who sits in my place. I, who should be the greatest woman in Europe, am reduced so low that it is only her support that saved my life when the Scots rebels held me and threatened my execution, and it is her charity that houses me in England now.

I am only twenty-six years old and I have lived three lifetimes already! I deserve the highest place in the world and yet I occupy the lowest. But still I am a queen, I am a queen three times over. I was born Queen of Scotland, I was crowned Queen of France, and I am heir to the crown of England. Is it likely I will wear anything but ermine?

I tell my ladies-in-waiting, Mary Seton and Agnes Livingstone, that they can tell my hosts, Lord and Lady Scrope of Bolton Castle, that all my gowns, my favourite goods and my personal furniture must be brought from Scotland at once and that I will wear nothing but my own beautiful clothes. I tell them that I will go in rags rather than wear anything but a queen’s wardrobe. I will crouch on the floorboards if I cannot sit on a throne under a cloth of estate.

It is a small victory for me as they hurry to obey me, and the great wagons come down the road from Edinburgh bringing my gowns, my bureaux, my linen, my silver, and my furniture; but I fear I have lost my jewels. The best of them, including my precious black pearls, have gone missing from my jewel chests. They are the finest pearls in Europe, a triple rope of matched rare black pearls, everyone knows they are mine. Who could be so wicked as to profit from my loss? Who would have the effrontery to wear a queen’s pearls robbed from her ransacked treasury? Who would sink so low as to want them, knowing they had been stolen from me when I was fighting for my life?

My half-brother must have broken into my treasure room and stolen them. My false brother, who swore to be faithful, has betrayed me; my husband Bothwell, who swore he would win, is defeated. My son James, my most precious son, my baby, my only heir, whom I swore to protect, is in the hands of my enemies. We are all forsworn, we are all betrayers, we are all betrayed. And I – in one brilliant leap for freedom – am somehow caught again.

I had thought that my cousin Elizabeth would understand at once that if my people rise against me in Scotland, then she is in danger in England. What difference? Rien du tout! In both countries we rule a troublesome people divided in the matter of religion, speaking the same language, longing for the certainties of a king but unable to find anyone but a queen to take the throne. I thought she would grasp that we queens have to stick together, that if the people pull me down and call me a whore then what is to stop them abusing her? But she is slow, oh God! She is so slow! She is as sluggish as a stupid man, and I cannot abide slowness and stupidity. While I demand safe conduct to France – for my French family will restore me to my throne in Scotland at once – she havers and dithers and calls for an inquiry and sends for lawyers and advisors and judges and they all convene in Westminster Palace.

To judge what, for God’s sake? To inquire into what? For what is there to know? Exactement! Nothing! They say that when my husband, the fool Darnley, killed David Rizzio, I swore vengeance and persuaded my next lover the Earl of Bothwell to blow him out of his bed with gunpowder and then to strangle him as he ran naked through the garden.

Madness! As if I should ever allow an assault on one of royal blood, even for my own vengeance. My husband must be as inviolable as myself. A royal person is sacred as a god. As if anyone with half a wit would commission such a ridiculous plot. Only an idiot would blow up a whole house to kill a man when he could easily smother him with a quiet pillow in his sottish sleep! As if Bothwell, the cleverest and wickedest man in Scotland, would use half a dozen men and barrels of gunpowder, when a dark night and a sharp knife would do the deed.

Finally, and worst of all, they say that I rewarded this incompetent assassination by running off with the assassin, the Earl of Bothwell, conceiving children in adulterous lust, marrying him for love, and declaring war against my own people for sheer wickedness.

I am innocent of this, and of the murder. That is the simple truth and those who cannot believe it have made up their minds to hate me already for my wealth, for my beauty, for my religion, or because I was born to greatness. The accusations are nothing but vile slander, calomnie vile. But it is sheer folly to repeat it word for word, as Elizabeth’s inquiry intends to do. Utter idiocy to give it the credence of an official inquiry. If you dare to say that Elizabeth is unchaste with Robert Dudley or any other of the half-dozen men who have been named with her through her scandalous years, starting with her own stepfather Thomas Seymour when she was a girl, then you are dragged before a justice of the peace and your tongue is slit by the blacksmith. And this is right and proper. A queen’s reputation must be untouched by comment. A queen must seem to be perfect.

But if you say that I am unchaste – a fellow queen, anointed just as she is, and with royal blood on both sides that she lacks – then you can repeat this in Westminster Palace before whoever cares to come by to listen, and call it evidence.

Why would she be such a fool as to encourage gossip about a queen? Can she not see that when she allows them to slander me she damages not just me, but my estate, which is exactly the same as her own? Disrespect to me will wipe the shine off her. We should both defend our state.

I am a queen, different rules apply for queens. I have had to endure events as a woman that I would never even name as a queen. I would not stoop to acknowledge them. Yes, I have been kidnapped, I have been imprisoned, I have been raped – but I will never, never complain of it. As a queen my person must be inviolate, my body is always holy, my presence is sacred. Shall I lose that powerful magic for the benefit of moaning on about my injuries? Shall I trade majesty itself for the pleasure of a word of sympathy? Would I prefer to command, or do I long to whimper about my wrongs? Shall I order men, or shall I weep at the fireside with other injured women?

Of course. The answer to this is simple. Bien sûr. No-one must ever pity me. They can love me or hate me or fear me. But I shall never let anyone pity me. Of course, when they ask me, did Bothwell abuse you? I will answer nothing, not at all, never a word. A queen does not complain that she has been ill-treated. A queen denies that such a thing could happen. I cannot be robbed of myself, I cannot mislay my own divinity. I may be abused but I will always deny it. Whether I am seated on a throne or wearing rags, I am still a queen. I am no commoner who has to hope for the right to wear velvet or live out his life in homespun. I am above all degree of ordinary men and women. I am ordained, I am chosen by God. How can they be so dense as not to see it? I could be the worst woman in the world and I would still be queen. I could romp with a dozen Italian secretaries, a regiment of Bothwells, and write them all love poems, and I would still be queen. They can force me to sign a dozen abdications and lock me in prison forever but I will still be queen and anyone who sits on my throne will be a usurper. Je suis la reine. I am queen till death. It is not an office, it is not an occupation, it is an inheritance of blood. I am queen while the blood flows through my veins. So I know. So everyone knows. So even they know, in their faithless hearts, the fools.

If they want rid of me there is only one way; but they will never dare to take it. If they want rid of me they will have to sin against the order of heaven. They will have to defy the God-given chain of being. If they want rid of me they will have to behead me.

Think of that!

The only way I cease to be Dowager Queen of France, Queen of Scotland, and the only true heir to the throne of England is when I am dead. They will have to kill me if they want to deny me my throne. And I wager my title, my fortune and my life that they will never dare to do that. To lay violent hands on me would be the same as throwing down an angel, a sin like crucifying the Christ again. For I am no ordinary woman, I am a sanctified queen, I am seated above every mortal; only the angels are my superiors. Mortals cannot kill such a being as me. I am anointed with holy oil, I am chosen by God. I am untouchable. They can fear me and they can hate me, they can even deny me. But they cannot kill me. Thank God, I am at least safe in this. I will always be safe in this.

1568, Winter, Chatsworth: Bess

I have news from my husband the earl, of the inquiry at Westminster. (I am still newly wed, I love to say ‘my-husband-the-earl’.) He writes to me almost daily to tell me of his discomfort, and in return I send him news of his children and mine, home-baked pies and the best Chatsworth cider. He says he has been secretly shown letters of the most damning evidence, love letters from the married queen to the married Earl of Bothwell urging him to kill her husband, poor young Lord Darnley, telling him that she is on fire with lust for him. Wanton poems, promises of nights of pleasure, French pleasures are especially mentioned.

I think of the judges – my husband, young Thomas Howard, his friend the Earl of Sussex and old Sir Ralph Sadler, Robert Dudley and my good friend William Cecil, Nicholas Bacon, Sir Thomas Percy, Sir Henry Hastings, and all the others – reading this nonsense with shocked faces, trying to believe that a woman planning to murder her husband by packing his cellars with gunpowder would spend the very night before the explosion, at her husband’s sickbed, writing love poetry to her accomplice. It is so ridiculous that I wonder they are not laughed out of court.

But these are honest thoughtful highly respected men. They do not ask: what would a real woman do in such circumstances? They are not in the habit of considering the nature of any real woman. They look only at the evidence that is laid before them. And bless me – what a lot of evidence has been produced! What a lot of effort has been put into blackening her name! Someone, somewhere, has gone to a good deal of time and trouble: stealing her letters, copying her hand, writing them in French and then translating them into Scots and English, putting them into a special casket monogrammed with her initials (in case we thought that they had been written by some other Mary Stuart), and then having them discovered, amazingly badly hidden, in her private rooms. This Someone’s work is thorough and extremely convincing. Everyone who has seen the letters now believes that the young queen is an adulterous whore who murdered her young English husband for lust and revenge.

Now I might have an idea who this clever Someone would be. Actually, everyone in England would have a pretty good idea who this Someone might be. And it is rare that he does not have his way. This poor queen will find herself hopelessly outmatched by this Someone, who plans for the long term and plays a long game. She may find that if he does not catch her in his net this time, he will make another with a finer mesh, and again and then again, until she cannot escape.

This time though, it cannot be done; she has wriggled free. The greatest witness against her is her own bastard half-brother, but since he has seized the regency in her absence and holds her baby son as a hostage, not even a courtroom of highly respected men can bring themselves to believe a word that he says. His hatred of her is so obvious and his faithlessness so offensive that not even the judges appointed by Cecil can stomach him. The judges, including my husband, the earl, are all men who pride themselves on their loyalty. They look askance at a subject who is grossly treacherous. They do not like the behaviour of the Scots queen but they like the behaviour of her Scots lords even less. My bet is that they will rule that she has been ill-treated by her people and must be restored to her throne. Then the Scots can deal with their queen as they wish, and we cannot be blamed.

1568, Winter, Hampton Court: George

My queen, Elizabeth, is more generous and more just than anyone can imagine. With so much suspicion now raised and expressed against her cousin, she has ordered that the slanderous letters shall be kept secret forever, and she will restore her cousin to her kingdom. Elizabeth will not hear another word against her cousin, she will not have her name dragged through the mud. She is generous and just in this; we could never have reached a fair judgement without listening to the most terrible scandal, so Elizabeth has silenced both scandal and defence.

But even though she is a monarch of such justice and wisdom I find I am a little perturbed that I am summoned to see her.

She is not on her brown velvet throne embroidered with pearls and diamonds in the Paradise room, though there are, as ever, dozens of men waiting about, hoping to catch her attention when she comes out for company before dinner. The strangers to Hampton Court Palace examine the exquisite musical instruments that are scattered on tables around the room, or play draughts on the ebony boards. Those who are old hands at court idle in the window bays, concealing their boredom at the delay. I see Cecil, watchful as ever. Cecil, dressed in black like some poor clerk, is talking quietly with his brother-in-law Nicholas Bacon. Behind them hovers a man I don’t know, but who is now admitted into their councils, a man who wears his hat pulled down over his eyes as if he does not want to be recognised. And behind him, another new man, Francis Walsingham. I don’t know who these men are, nor where they belong, to which great families they are allied. To tell truth, most of them don’t have family – not as I understand such a thing. They are men without background. They have come from nowhere, they belong nowhere, they can be recruited by anyone.

I turn away as the queen’s lady-in-waiting Lady Clinton comes out through the grand double doors from the queen’s inner chamber, and when she sees me, speaks to the guard, who stands aside and lets me in.

There are more guards than usual, at every doorway and every gate to the castle. I have never seen the royal palace so heavily manned. These are bitterly troubled times, we have never needed such protection before. But these days there are many men – even Englishmen – who would carry a knife and strike down their own queen if they could. There are more of them than anyone could have dreamed. Now that the other queen, the one that they call the true heir, is actually in England, the choice between the Protestant princess and the Catholic rival is set before every man, and for every Protestant in the land today there are two secret Papists, probably more. How are we to live, when we are divided among ourselves, is a question I leave to Cecil, whose unending enmity to Catholics has done so much to bring this about, and to make a bad situation so much worse.

‘Is Her Grace in good spirits today?’ I ask in an undertone to her ladyship. ‘Happy?’

She understands me well enough to give me a quick sideways smile. ‘She is,’ she says. She means that the famous Tudor temper is not unleashed. I have to admit I am relieved. The moment that she sent for me I was afraid I would be scolded for letting the inquiry reach no damning conclusion. But what could I do? The terrible murder of Darnley and her suspicious marriage to Bothwell, his probable killer, which appeared as such a vile crime, may not have been her fault at all. She may have been victim rather than criminal. But unless Bothwell confesses everything from his cell, or unless she testifies to his wickedness, no-one can know what took place between the two of them. Her ambassador will not even discuss it. Sometimes I feel that I am too frightened even to speculate. I am not a man for great sins of the flesh, for great drama. I love Bess with a quiet affection, there is nothing dark and doomed about either of us. I don’t know what the queen and Bothwell were to each other; and I would rather not imagine.

Queen Elizabeth is seated in her chair by the fireside in her private chamber, under the golden cloth of estate, and I go towards her and sweep off my hat and bow low.

‘Ah, George Talbot, my dear old man,’ she says warmly, calling me by the nickname she has for me, and I know by this that she is in a sunny mood, and she gives me her hand to kiss.

She is still a beautiful woman. Whether in a temper, whether scowling in a mood or white-faced in fear, she is still a beautiful woman, though thirty-five years of age. When she first came to the throne she was a young woman in her twenties and then she was a beauty, pale-skinned and red-haired with the colour flushing in her cheeks and lips at the sight of Robert Dudley, at the sight of gifts, at the sight of the crowd outside her window. Now her colour is steady, she has seen everything there is to see, nothing delights her very much any more. She paints on her blushes in the morning, and refreshes them at night. Her russet hair has faded with age. Her dark eyes, which have seen so much and learned to trust so little, have become hard. She is a woman who has known some passion but no kindness; and it shows in her face.

The queen waves her hand and her women rise obediently and scatter out of earshot. ‘I have a task for you and for Bess, if you will serve me,’ she says.

‘Anything, Your Grace.’ My mind races. Can she want to come to stay with us this summer? Bess has been working on Chatsworth House ever since her former husband bought it, for this very purpose – to house the queen on her travels to the North. What an honour it will be, if she plans to come. What a triumph for me, and for Bess’s long-laid plan.

‘They tell me that your inquiry against the Scots queen, my cousin, failed to find anything to her discredit. I followed Cecil’s advice in pursuing the evidence till half my court was turning over the midden for letters, and hanging on the words of maids spying at bedroom doors. But there was nothing, I believe?’ She pauses for my confirmation.

‘Nothing but gossip, and some evidence that the Scots lords would not publicly show,’ I say tactfully. ‘I refused to see any secret slanders as evidence.’

She nods. ‘You would not, eh? Why not? Do you think I want a dainty man in my service? Are you too nice to serve your queen? Do you think this is a pretty world we live in and you can tiptoe through dry-shod?’

I swallow on a dry mouth. Pray God she is in a mood for justice and not for conspiracy. Sometimes her fears drive her to the wildest of beliefs. ‘Your Grace, they would not submit the letters as evidence for full scrutiny, they would not show them to the Queen Mary’s advisors. I would not see them secretly. It did not seem to be … just.’

Her dark eyes are piercing. ‘There are those who say she does not deserve justice.’

‘But I was appointed judge, by you.’ It is a feeble response, but what else can I say? ‘I have to be just if I am representing you, Your Majesty. If I am representing the queen’s justice, I cannot listen to gossip.’

Her face is as hard as a mask and then her smile breaks through. ‘You are an honourable man indeed,’ she says. ‘And I would be glad to see her name cleared of any shadow of suspicion. She is my cousin, she is a fellow queen, she should be my friend, not my prisoner.’

I nod. Elizabeth is a woman whose own innocent mother was beheaded for wantonness. Surely, she must naturally side with a woman unjustly accused? ‘Your Grace, we should have cleared her name on the evidence that was submitted. But you stopped the inquiry before it reached its conclusions. Her name should be free of any slur. We should publish our opinions and say that she is innocent of any charge. She can be your friend now. She can be released.’

‘We will make no announcement of her innocence,’ she rules. ‘Where would be the advantage to me in that? But she should be returned to her country and her throne.’

I bow. ‘Well, so I think, Your Grace. Your cousin Howard says she will need a good advisor and a small army at first to secure her safety.’

‘Oh, really? Does he? What good advisor?’ she asks sharply. ‘Who do you and my good cousin nominate to rule Scotland for Mary Stuart?’

I stumble. It is always like this with the queen, you never know when you have walked into a trap. ‘Whoever you think best, Your Grace. Sir Francis Knollys? Sir Nicholas Throckmorton? Hastings? Any reliable nobleman?’

‘But I am advised that the lords of Scotland and the regent make better rulers and better neighbours than she did,’ she says restlessly. ‘I am advised that she is certain to marry again, and what if she chooses a Frenchman or a Spaniard and makes him King of Scotland? What if she puts our worst enemies on our very borders? God knows her choice of husbands is always disastrous.’

It is not hard for a man who has been around the court for as long as I have to recognise the suspicious tone of William Cecil through every word of this. He has filled the queen’s head with such a terror of France and Spain that from the moment she came to the throne she has done nothing but fear plots and prepare for war. By doing so, he has made us enemies where we could have had allies. Philip of Spain has many true friends in England and his country is our greatest partner for trade, while France is our nearest neighbour. To hear Cecil’s advice you would think one was Sodom and the other Gomorrah. However, I am a courtier, I say nothing as yet. I stay silent till I know where this woman’s indecisive mind will flutter to rest.

‘What if she gains her throne, and marries an enemy? Shall we ever have peace on the northern borders, d’you think, Talbot? Would you trust such a woman as her?’

‘You need have no fear,’ I say. ‘No Scots army would ever get past your Northern lords. You can trust your old lords, the men who have been there forever. Percy, Neville, Dacre, Westmorland, Northumberland, all of us old lords. We keep your border safe, Your Grace. You can trust us. We keep armed and we keep the men levied and drilled. We have kept the Northern lands safe for hundreds of years. The Scots have never defeated us.’

She smiles at my assurance. ‘I know it. You and yours have been good friends to me and mine. But do you think I can trust the Queen of Scots to rule Scotland to our advantage?’

‘Surely, when she goes back she will have enough to do to reestablish her rule? We need not fear her enmity. She will want our friendship. She cannot be restored without it. If you help her back on her throne with your army, she will be eternally grateful. You can bind her with an agreement.’

‘I think so,’ she nods. ‘I think so indeed. And anyway, we cannot keep her here in England; there is no possible argument for keeping her here. We cannot imprison an innocent fellow queen. And better for us if she goes back to Edinburgh, than runs off to Paris to cause more trouble.’

‘She is queen,’ I say simply. ‘It cannot be denied. Queen born and ordained. It must be God’s will that she sits on her throne. And surely, it is safer for us if she can bring the Scots to peace than if they are fighting against each other. The border raids in the North have been worse since she was thrown down. The border raiders fear no-one, now that Bothwell is far away in prison. Any rule is better than none. Better the queen should rule than no rule at all. And surely, the French or the Spanish will restore her if we do not? And if they put her back on the throne we will have a foreign army on our doorstep, and she will be grateful to them, and that must be far worse for us.’

‘Aye,’ she says firmly, as if she has made a decision. ‘So think I.’

‘Perhaps you can swear an alliance with her,’ I suggest. ‘Better to deal with a queen, you two queens together, than be forced to haggle with a usurper, a new false power in Scotland. And her half-brother is clearly guilty of murder and worse.’

I could not have said anything that pleased her more. She nods and puts her hand up to caress her pearls. She has a magnificent triple rope of black pearls, thick as a ruff, around her throat.

‘He laid hands on her,’ I prompt her. ‘She is an ordained queen and he seized her against her will and imprisoned her. That’s a sin against the law and against heaven. You cannot want to deal with such an impious man as that. How should he prosper if he can attack his own queen?’

‘I will not deal with traitors,’ she declares. Elizabeth has a horror of anyone who would challenge a monarch. Her own hold on her own throne was unsteady in the early years, and even now her claim is actually not as good as that of the Queen of Scots. Elizabeth was registered as Henry’s bastard and she never revoked the act of parliament. But Mary Queen of Scots is the granddaughter of Henry’s sister. Her line is true, legitimate and strong.

‘I will never deal with traitors,’ she repeats. She smiles, and at once I see again the pretty young woman who came to the throne with no objection at all to dealing with traitors. She had been the centre of all the rebellions against her sister, Mary Tudor, but was always too clever to be caught. ‘I want to be a just kinswoman to the Scots queen,’ she says. ‘She may be young and foolish and she has made mistakes that are shocking beyond words – but she is my kinswoman and she is a queen. She must be well treated, and she must be restored. I am ready to love her as a good kinswoman and see her rule her country as she should.’

‘There speaks a great queen and a generous woman,’ I say. It never hurts with Elizabeth to slather on a bit of praise. Besides, it is earned. It will not be easy for Elizabeth to resist the terrors that Cecil frightens her with. It will not be easy for her to be generous to a younger and more beautiful kinswoman. Elizabeth won her throne after a lifetime of plotting. She cannot help but fear an heir with a claim to the throne, and every reason to conspire. She knows what it is like to be the heir excluded from court. She knows that when she was the heir excluded from court she spun one plot after another, murderous rebellions that nearly succeeded in destroying her half-sister and bringing down the throne. She knows what a false friend she was to her sister – it will be impossible for her to trust her cousin who is, just as she was, a young princess impatient of waiting.

She beams at me. ‘So, Talbot. This brings me to your task.’

I wait.

‘I want you to house the Scots queen for me, and then take her back to her kingdom when the time is right,’ she says.

‘House her?’ I repeat.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Cecil will prepare for her return to Scotland; in the meantime, you shall house her and entertain her, treat her as a queen, and when Cecil sends you word, escort her back to Edinburgh, and return her to her throne.’

It is an honour so great that I can hardly catch my breath at the thought of it. To be host to the Queen of Scotland and to return her to her kingdom in triumph! Cecil must be sick with envy; he has no house half as grand as Bess’s at Chatsworth, though he is building like a madman. But not fast enough, so she will have to come to us. I am the only nobleman who could do the task. Cecil has no house and Norfolk, as a widower, has no wife. No-one has a grand house and a well-loved loyal reliable wife like Bess.

‘I am honoured,’ I say calmly. ‘You can trust me.’ Of course, I think of Bess, and how thrilled she will be that Chatsworth will house a queen at last. We will be the envy of every family in England, they will all want to visit us. We shall have open house all the summer, we shall be a royal court. I shall hire musicians and masquers, dancers and players. We will be one of the royal courts of Europe – and it will all be under my roof.

She nods. ‘Cecil will make the arrangements with you.’

I step backwards. She smiles at me, the dazzling smile that she gives to the crowds when they call out her name: the Tudor charm at full meridian. ‘I am grateful to you, Talbot,’ she says. ‘I know you will keep her safe in these troubled times, and see her safely home again. It will only be for the summer and you will be richly rewarded.’

‘It will be my honour to serve you,’ I say. ‘As always.’ I bow again and walk backwards and then out of the presence chamber. Only when the door is closed and the guards before it cross their halberds once more do I allow myself to whistle at my luck.

1568, Winter, Bolton Castle: Mary

My faithful friend, Bishop John Lesley of Ross, who has followed me into exile, saying that he cannot stay at home in comfort beside an empty throne, writes to me in our secret code from London. He says that although Elizabeth’s third and final inquiry in Westminster Palace could find nothing against me, yet the French ambassador has not yet been told to prepare for my journey to Paris. He is afraid that Elizabeth will find an excuse to keep me in England for another week, another month, God only knows how long; she has the patience of a tormentor. But I have to trust to her friendship, I have to rely on her good sense as a cousin and a fellow queen. Whatever my doubts about her – a bastard and a heretic though she is – I have to remember that she has written to me with love and promised her support, she has sent me a ring as pledge of my safety forever.

But while she hesitates and considers, all this while, my son is in the hands of my enemies, and his tutors are Protestants. He is two years old; what they tell him of me, I cannot bear to imagine. I have to get back to him before they poison him against me.

I have men and women loyal to me, waiting for my return, I cannot make them wait forever. Bothwell, imprisoned in Denmark on a ridiculous charge of bigamy, will be planning his own escape, thinking ahead to setting me free, determined that we shall be reunited on the throne of Scotland. With or without him I have to get back and claim my throne. I have God’s hand of destiny on my life, I was born to rule Scotland. I cannot refuse the challenge to win back my throne. My mother gave her life to keep the kingdom for me, I shall honour her sacrifice and pass it on to my heir, my son, her grandson, my little boy, James, Prince James, heir to Scotland and to England, my precious son.

I cannot wait to see what Elizabeth will do. I cannot wait for her slowly to act. I don’t know if my son is safely guarded, I don’t even know if he is well-nursed. His false uncle, my half-brother, has never loved him; what if he has him killed? I left him with trustworthy guardians in Stirling Castle; but what if they are besieged? I dare not sit here quietly and wait for Elizabeth to forge a treaty with my enemies that sends me on parole to France, or orders me to hide in some convent. I have to get back to Scotland and enter the battle for my throne once more. I did not escape from Lochleven Castle to do nothing. I did not break free from one prison to wait quietly in another. I have to be free.

Nobody can know what this is like for me. Certainly not Elizabeth, who was practically raised in prison, under suspicion from the age of four. She is a woman trained to a cell. But I have been mistress of my own great rooms since I was a girl of eleven in France. My mother insisted I should have my own rooms, my own presence chamber, my own entourage; even as a child I had the ordering of my own household. Then as now, I cannot bear to be constrained; I must be free.

The ambassador bids me keep up my courage and wait for his news. But I cannot just wait. I cannot have patience. I am a young woman in the very prime of my health and beauty and fertility. They have left me to celebrate my twenty-sixth birthday in prison. What do they think they are doing to me? What do they think I will endure? I cannot be confined. I must be free. I am a queen, I was born to command. They will find that I am a dangerous and untamed prisoner. They will find that I will be free.

1568, Winter, Chatsworth House: Bess

Cecil’s clerk writes to tell me that Mary Queen of Scots is not to come to us at Chatsworth, where I could entertain her as she deserves: in a great house with a beautiful park and everything done as it should be. No, she is to come to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire: one of our poorest properties and half-derelict, and I have to turn my life upside down to make this ruin fit for a queen in the middle of winter.

‘If your lord and husband could only have been prevailed on to see all the evidence against her, she could have been returned to Scotland in disgrace already,’ Cecil writes, sweet as an unripe apple, in a postscript. ‘Then we would all have been able to rest easy this Christmastide.’

There is no need for Cecil to reproach me. I warned my lord that the inquiry was a sham and a show, as close to life as are the mummers dressed in motley at Christmas. I told him that if he chose to become a player in this scene of Cecil’s devising then he must follow the playscript word by word. He was not invited there to improvise. He should have found the verdict that Cecil wanted. But he would not. If you hire an honourable man to do dirty work you will find the work honourably done. Cecil chose the wrong lord when he chose my husband to supervise the disgrace of the Scots queen. And so Cecil has no scandal, and no dishonoured queen, and I have no husband at home, and I have to clean and rebuild a derelict castle in the middle of winter.

Cecil says: ‘I am sorry that you have to house this Athalia; but I hope it will not be for long, for certainty, she will follow the destiny of her namesake.’

This obviously means something to Cecil, who has the benefit of a man’s education, but for a woman such as me, the daughter of a farmer, it is as opaque as a code. Fortunately, my darling son Henry is staying with me, on a brief holiday from his place at court. His father, my second husband, Cavendish, left me with instructions and an income to get him educated like a gentleman, and I sent him, and then his two brothers, to school at Eton.

‘Who is Athalia?’ I ask him.

‘Obscure,’ he replies.

‘So obscure that you don’t know the answer?’

He smiles lazily at me. He is a handsome boy and he knows that I dote on him.

‘So, my Mama-Countess. What is the information worth to you? We live in a world where all intelligence is for sale. You pay me well enough to report the gossip from court. I am your spy in the house of your friend Robert Dudley. Everyone has an informant and I am merely one of many of yours, I know. What will you pay me for the fruits of my education?’

‘I have paid for it once already in your tutors’ fees,’ I reply. ‘And they were dear enough. Besides, I think you don’t say because you don’t know. You are an ignoramus and my money was wasted on your education. I hoped to buy myself a scholar and all I have is an idiot.’

He laughs. He is such a handsome boy. He has all the disadvantages of a rich boy. Even though he is my own darling, I can see it clearly. He has no idea that money is hard to earn, that our world is filled with opportunity and also danger. He has no idea that his father and I went to the limits of the law and beyond to make the fortune that we would lavish on him and on his brothers and sisters. He will never work as I do, he will never worry as I do. To tell the truth, he has no idea of either work or worry. He is a well-fed boy, whereas I was raised with hunger – a hunger for everything. He takes Chatsworth for granted as his pleasant home, his due; whereas I have put my heart and soul here, and I would sell my heart and soul to keep it. He will be an earl if I can buy him an earldom, a duke, if I can afford it. He will be the founder of a new noble family: a Cavendish. He will make the Cavendish name a noble one. And he will take it all, as if it came easily, as if he had to do nothing but smile as the sun warmly smiles on him; bless him.

‘You misjudge me. I do know, actually,’ he says. ‘I am not such an idiot as you think. Athalia is in the Old Testament. She was a queen of the Hebrews and she was accused of adultery and killed by the priests, so as to free her throne so that her son Joash could become king.’

I can feel my indulgent smile freeze on my face. This is no matter for jokes. ‘They killed her?’

‘They did indeed. She was known to be unchaste, and unfit to rule. So they killed her and put her son in her place.’ He pauses. His dark eyes gleam at me. ‘There is a general view, I know vulgar, Mama, but a general view, that no woman is fit to rule. Women are by nature inferior to men and it goes against nature if they so much as try to command. Athalia was – tragically for her – only typical.’

I raise a finger to him. ‘Are you sure of that? Do you want to say any more? Would you like to expound further on female inability?’

‘No! No!’ he laughs.‘I was expressing the vulgar view, the common error, that is all. I am no John Knox, I don’t think you are all a monstrous regiment of women, honestly, Mama, I do not. I am not likely to think that women are simple-minded. I have been brought up by a mother who is a tyrant and commander of her own lands. I am the last man in the world to think that a woman cannot command.’

I try to smile with him but inwardly I am perturbed. If Cecil is naming the Scots queen as Athalia then he means me to understand that she will be forced to let her baby son take the throne. Perhaps he even means that she will die to make way for him. Clearly, Cecil does not believe that the inquiry cleared her of the murder of her husband and of adultery with his killer. Cecil wants her publicly shamed and sent away. Or worse. Surely he cannot dream that she could be executed? Not for the first time I am glad that Cecil is my friend; for he is certainly a dangerous enemy.

I send my son Henry, and my dear stepson Gilbert Talbot, back to court and tell them that there is no point staying with me, for I have work to do; they might as well see in the Christmas season in comfort and merriment in London, for I can provide neither. They go willingly enough, revelling in each other’s company and in the adventure of the ride south. They are like a pair of handsome twins, alike in age – seventeen and fifteen – and in education, though my boy Henry, I must say, is far and away naughtier than my new husband’s son, and leads him into trouble whenever he can.

Then I have to strip my beautiful house, Chatsworth, of hangings and tapestries and carpets, and ship linen by the cartload. This Queen of Scots is to come with a household of thirty persons and they will all have to sleep somewhere, and I know full well that Tutbury Castle has no furniture nor comfort of any kind. I command my Chatsworth chief steward of the household, the grooms of the servery and of the buttery and the master of horse at the stables to send food and trenchers, knives, table linen, flagons and glassware by the wagon-load to Tutbury Castle. I command the carpentry shop to start making beds and trestle tables and benches. My lord uses Tutbury no more than once a year, as a hunting lodge, and the place is barely furnished. Myself, I have not ever been there, and I am only sorry that I have to go there now.

Then, when Chatsworth is in chaos from my orders and the wagons are stuffed with my goods, I have to climb on my own horse with my teeth gritted at the stupidity of this journey, and at the head of my own wagons I ride south-east for four hard days across inhospitable country on roads that are frosty in the morning and thick with mud by midday, through fords which are swollen with freezing floods, starting at wintry dawn and ending in the early dark. All this, so that we can get to Tutbury and try to put the place into some kind of order before this troublesome queen arrives to make us all unhappy.

1568, Winter, Hampton Court: George

‘But why does the queen want her taken to Tutbury Castle?’ I ask William Cecil, who of all men in England always knows everything, he is a tradesman of secrets. He is the very monopolist of secrecy. ‘Chatsworth would be more fitting. Surely the queen wants us to house her at Chatsworth? To be honest, I have not been to Tutbury myself in years; but you know that Bess bought Chatsworth with her previous husband and brought it as her dowry to me, and she has made it very lovely.’

‘The Scots queen won’t be with you for long,’ Cecil says mildly. ‘And I would rather have her in a house with a single entrance by a guardhouse, which can be well-guarded, than have her gazing out of fifty windows over beautiful parkland and slipping out of half a dozen doors into the gardens.’

‘You don’t think we might be attacked?’ I am shocked at the very thought of it. Only later do I realise that he seems to know the grounds of Tutbury Castle, which is odd, since he has never visited. He sounds as if he knows it better than I do myself, and how could that be?

‘Who knows what might happen, or what a woman like her will take into her head to do, or what support she can attract? Who would have thought that a score of educated noblemen, clearly instructed and advised, with well-trained witnesses and perfect evidence, would sit down to inquire into her behaviour, see the most scandalous material ever written, and then rise up, having decided nothing? Who would have thought that I would convene a tribunal three times over, and still be unable to get a conviction? Are you all so besotted with her?’

‘A conviction?’ I repeat. ‘You make it sound like a trial. I thought it was a conference? You told me it was an inquiry.’

‘I fear our queen has been ill-served in this.’

‘But how?’ I ask. ‘I thought we did what she wanted. She stopped the inquiry herself, saying that it was unjust to the Queen of Scots? Surely she has cleared the Scots queen of any wrongdoing? Surely you should be glad? Surely our queen is glad that we held a thorough inquiry but could find nothing against her cousin? And that being so, why should our queen not invite Queen Mary to live with her at court? Why should she come to us at all? Why should they not live as cousins in harmony, queen and heir? Now that her name is cleared?’

Cecil chokes on a laugh that he cannot silence, and claps me on the shoulder. ‘You know, you are the very man to keep her safe for us,’ he says warmly. ‘I think you are the most honourable man in England, indeed. Your wife is right to caution me that you are a man of utter honour. And the queen will be indebted to you for your good guardianship of her dear cousin. I am sure that all of us are as glad as you are that the inquiry cleared the Scots queen’s name, and now we know that she is innocent. You have proved her innocent, thank God. And we will all have to live with the consequences.’

I am troubled, and I let him see it. ‘You did not want her cleared of blame?’ I say slowly. ‘And you want her at Tutbury, and not held with honour at Chatsworth?’ I have a sense of something amiss. ‘I have to warn you: I will only deal with her fairly, Master Secretary. I will have to beg an audience and ask our queen what she intends.’

‘Nothing but good,’ he says smoothly. ‘As I do. As you do. You know that the queen is going to invite you to become a member of the Privy Council?’

I gasp. ‘Privy Council?’ This has been a long time coming. My family name commends me; but I have had to wait a long time for this moment, it is an honour that I have yearned for.

‘Oh yes,’ he says with a smile. ‘Her Majesty trusts you so well. Trusts you with this task, and others that will follow. Will you serve the queen without question?’

‘I always do,’ I say. ‘You know, I always do.’

Cecil smiles. ‘I know. So guard the other queen and keep her safe for us until we can return her safely to Scotland. And make sure you don’t fall in love with her, good Talbot. They say she’s quite irresistible.’

‘Under my Bess’s nose? And us married less than a year?’

‘Bess is your safeguard as you are ours,’ he says. ‘Give her my warmest wishes and tell her that when she next comes to London she must break her journey at my house. She will want to see the progress I am making with it. And if I am not mistaken she will want to borrow some of my plans; but she may not steal my builders. Last time she came I found her in deep conversation with my plasterer. She was tempting him away to flower her hall. I swore I would never trust her with one of my artisans again, she poaches them, she truly does. And I suspect her of putting up wages.’

‘She will give up her building projects while she is caring for the queen,’ I tell him. ‘Anyway, I think she must have finished the work on Chatsworth by now. How much work does a house need? It is good enough now, surely? She will have to give up her business interests too, I shall have my stewards take over her work.’

‘You’ll never get her to hand over her farms and her mines, and she’ll never finish building,’ he predicts. ‘She is a great artificer, your new wife. She likes to build things, she likes property and trade. She is a rare woman, a venturer in her heart. She will build a chain of houses across the country, and run your estates like a kingdom, and launch a fleet of ships for you, and found a dynasty of your children. Bess will only be satisfied when they are all dukes. She is a woman whose only sense of safety is property.’

I never like it when Cecil talks like this. His own rise from clerk to lord has been so sudden, on the coat-tails of the queen, that he likes to think that everyone has made their fortunes from the fall of the church, and that every house is built with the stone of abbeys. He praises Bess and her mind for business, only to excuse himself. He admires her profits because he wants to think that such gains are admirable. But he forgets that some of us come from a great family that was rich long before the church lands were grabbed by greedy new men; and some of us have titles that go back generations. Some of us came over as Norman noblemen in 1066. This means something, if only for some of us. Some of us are wealthy enough, without stealing from priests.

But it is hard to say any of this without sounding pompous. ‘My wife does nothing that does not befit her position,’ I say, and Cecil gives a little laugh as if he knows exactly what I am thinking.

‘There is nothing about the countess and her abilities that does not befit her position,’ he says smoothly. ‘And her position is very grand indeed. You are the greatest nobleman in England, Talbot, we all know that. And you do right to remind us, should we ever make the mistake of forgetting it. And all of us at court appreciate Bess’s good sense, she has been a favourite amongst us all for many years. I have watched her marry upwards and upwards with great pleasure. We are counting on her to make Tutbury Castle a pleasant home for the Queen of Scots. The countess is the only hostess we could consider. No-one else could house the Queen of Scots. Any other house would be too mean. No-one but Bess would know how to do it. No-one but Bess could triumph.’

This flattery from Cecil should content me; but we seem to be back to Bess again, and Cecil should remember that before I married her she was a woman who had come up from nothing.

1568, Winter, Bolton Castle: Mary

It is to be tonight. I am going to escape from Bolton Castle, their so-called, soi-disant, ‘impregnable’ Yorkshire castle, this very night. Part of me thinks: I dare not do this; but I am more terrified of being trapped in this country and unable to go either forward or back. Elizabeth is like a fat ginger cat on a cushion, she is content to sit and dream. But I must reclaim my throne; and in every day of my exile, the situation grows worse for me. I have castles holding out for me in Scotland and I must get relief to them at once. I have men ready to march under my standard, I cannot make them wait. I cannot let my supporters die for lack of my courage. I have Bothwell’s promise that he will escape from Denmark, and return to command my armies. I have written to the King of Denmark, demanding Bothwell’s freedom. He is my husband, the consort of a queen, how dare they hold him on the word of a merchant’s daughter who complains that he promised marriage? It is nonsense, and the complaints of such a woman are of no importance. I have a French army mustering to support me, and promises of Spanish gold to pay them. Most of all, I have a son, a precious heir, mon bébé, mon chéri, my only love; and he is in the hands of my enemies. I cannot leave him in their care: he is only two years old! I have to act. I have to rescue him. The thought of him without proper care, not knowing where I am, not understanding that I was forced to leave him, burns me like an ulcer in my heart. I have to get back to him.

Elizabeth may dawdle; but I cannot. On the last day of her nonsensical inquiry I received a message from one of the Northern lords, Lord Westmorland, who promises me his help. He says he can get me out of Bolton Castle, he can get me to the coast. He has a train of horses waiting in Northallerton and a ship waiting off Whitby. He tells me that when I say the word he can get me to France – and as soon as I am safe at home, in the country of my late husband’s family, where I was raised to be queen, then my fortunes will change in an instant.

I don’t delay, as Elizabeth would delay. I don’t drag my feet and puzzle away and put myself to bed, pretending illness as she does whenever she is afraid. I see a chance when it comes to me and I take it like a woman of courage. ‘Yes,’ I say to my rescuer. ‘Oui,’ I say to the gods of fortune, to life itself.

And when he says to me: ‘When?’, I say, ‘Tonight.’

I don’t fear, I am frightened of nothing. I escaped from my own palace at Holyrood when I was held by murderers, I escaped from Linlithgow Castle. They will see that they can take me but they cannot hold me. Bothwell himself said that to me once, he said: ‘A man can take you; but you cling to your belief that he can never own you.’ And I replied: ‘I am always queen. No man can command me.’

The walls of Bolton Castle are rough-hewn grey stone, a place built to resist cannon; but I have a rope around my waist and thick gloves to protect my hands and stout boots so that I can kick myself away. The window is narrow, little more than a slit in the stone, but I am slim and lithe, and I can wriggle out and sit with my back to the very edge of the precipice, looking down. The porter takes the rope and hands it to Agnes Livingstone and watches her as she ties it around my waist. He makes a gesture to tell her to check that it is tight. He cannot touch me, my body is sacred, so she has to do everything under his instruction. I am watching his face. He is not an adherent of mine, but he has been paid well, and he looks determined to do his part in this. I think I can trust him. I give him a little smile and he sees my lip tremble with fear for he says, in his rough northern accent, ‘Dinnae fret, pet.’ And I smile as if I understand him and watch him wind the rope around his waist. He braces himself and I wriggle to the very brink and look down.

Dear God, I cannot see the ground. Below me is darkness and the howl of air. I cling to the post of the window as if I cannot let it go. Agnes is white with fear, the porter’s face steady. If I am going to go, I have to go now. I release the comfort of the stone arch of the window, I let myself stretch out on to the rope. I step out into air. I feel the rope go taut and terrifyingly thin, and I start to walk backwards, into the darkness, into nothingness, my feet pushing against the great stones of the walls, my skirt filling and flapping in the wind.

At first, I feel nothing but terror; but my confidence grows as I take step after step and feel the porter letting out the rope. I look up and see how far I have come down, though I don’t dare to look below. I think I am going to make it. I can feel the joy at being free growing inside me until my very feet tremble against the wall. I feel sheer joy at the breath of the wind on my face, and even joy at the vast space beneath me as I go down; joy at being outside the castle when they think I am captive, cooped up in my stuffy rooms, joy at being in charge of my own life again, even though I am dangling at the end of a rope like a hooked trout, joy at being me – a woman in charge of her own life – once more.

The ground comes up underneath me in a dark hidden rush and I stagger to my feet, untie the rope and give it three hard tugs and they pull it back up. Beside me is my page, and Mary Seton, my lifelong companion. My maid-in-waiting will come down next; my second lady-in-waiting, Agnes Livingstone, after her.

The sentries at the main gate are careless, I can see them against the pale road, but they cannot see us against the dark of the castle walls. In a moment there is to be a diversion – a barn is to be fired, and when they hurry to put out the fire, we will run down to the gate where horses will come galloping up the road, each rider leading a spare, the fastest for me, and we will be up and away, before they have even realised we are gone.

I stand quite still, not fidgeting. I am excited and I feel strong and filled with the desire to run. I feel as if I could sprint to Northallerton, even to the sea at Whitby. I can feel my power flowing through me, my strong young desire for life, speeding faster for fear and excitement. It beats in my heart and it tingles in my fingers. Dear God, I have to be free. I am a woman who has to be free. I would rather die than not be free. It is true: I would rather die than not be free.

I can hear the soft scuffle as Ruth, my maid, climbs out of the window and then the rustle of her skirts as the porter starts to lower her. I can see the dark outline of her quietly coming down the castle wall, then suddenly the rope jerks and she gives a little whimper of fear.

‘Sshh! Sssh!’ I hiss up at her, but she is sixty feet above me, she cannot hear. Mary’s cold hand slips into mine. Ruth isn’t moving, the porter is not letting her down, something has gone terribly wrong, then she falls like a bag of dusters, the rope snaking down from above her as he drops it, and we hear her terrified scream.

The thud when she hits the ground is an awful sound. She has broken her back, for sure. I run to her side at once, and she is moaning in pain, her hand clamped over her mouth, trying, even at this moment, not to betray me.

‘Your Grace!’ Mary Seton is tugging at my arm. ‘Run! They are coming.’

I hesitate for a moment, Ruth’s pale face is twisted with agony, now she has her fist thrust in her mouth, trying not to cry out. I look towards the main gate. The sentries, having heard her scream, are turned questingly towards the castle, a man runs forward, shouts to another, someone brings a torch from the sconce at the gateway. They are like hounds spreading out to scent the quarry.

I pull my hood up over my head to hide my face, and start to duck backwards into the shadows. Perhaps we can get around the castle and out of a back gate. Perhaps there is a sally-port or somewhere we can hide. Then there is a shout from inside the castle, they have raised the alarm in my chambers. At once the night is ablaze with the bobbing flames of torches and ‘Hi! Hi! Hi!’ they bellow like hunters, like beaters driving the game before them.

I turn to one side and then the other, my heart thudding, ready to run. But now they have seen us silhouetted by their torches against the dark walls of the castle, and there is a great bellow of ‘View halloa! Here she is! Cut her off! Run round! Here she is! Bring her to bay!’

I can feel my courage drain from me as if I am bleeding to death, and I am icy. The taste of defeat is like cold iron in my mouth, like the bit for an unbroken filly. I could spit the bitter taste. I want to run and I want to throw myself face down on the ground and weep for my freedom. But this is not the way of a queen. I have to find the courage to push back my hood and stand straight and tall as the men come running up and thrust their torches in my face so they can see what they have caught. I have to stand still and proud, I have to be seen to be a queen, even dressed like a serving woman in a black travelling cape. I have to enact being a queen so they do not treat me as a serving woman. There is nothing more important now, at this moment of my humiliation, than preserving the power of majesty. I am a queen. No mortal man may touch me. I have to make the magic of majesty all alone, in the darkness.

‘Je suis la reine,’ I say, but my voice is too quiet. I can hear it tremble with my distress. I stand taller and lift up my chin, I speak louder. ‘I am the Queen of Scotland.’

Thank God they don’t grab me, nor put so much as one hand on me. I think I would die of shame if a common man were to abuse me again. The thought of Bothwell’s hand on my breast, his mouth on my neck, makes me burn even now.

‘I warn you! You may not touch me!’

They form a circle around me with their bowed-down torches, as if I am a witch that can be held only by a ring of fire. Someone says that Lord Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, is coming. He was at his dinner with Sir Francis Knollys and Lord Scrope, and they have told him that the Scots queen was running away like a thief in the night, but she is caught now.

And so that’s how he first sees me, when he comes at a stumbling run, his tired face scowling with worry. He sees me standing alone, in a black cape with my hood pushed back from my face so that everyone can recognise me and know that they may not put a hand on me. A white-faced anointed queen of the blood. A queen in every way, showing the power of defiance, a queen in the authority of her stance, a queen in everything but the ownership of her thrones.

I am a queen at bay.

1568, Winter, Bolton Castle: George

They have her ringed with torches, like a witch held in by fire, ready for burning. As I run up, my breath is coming hard and my chest is tight, my heart is pounding from the sudden alarm, I sense the stillness around her as if they are all frozen by an enchantment. As if she were a witch indeed and the mere sight of her has turned them all to stone. Her hand holds back her hood from her face and I can see her dark hair, cropped jagged and short as an urchin’s, the white oval of her face and her dark luminous eyes. She looks at me, unsmiling, and I cannot look away. I should bow, but I cannot bow. I should introduce myself, at this, our first meeting; but I am lost for words. Someone should be here to present me, I should have a herald to announce my titles. But I feel as if I am naked before her: it is just her, and just me, facing each other like enemies across the flames.

I stare at her and take in every aspect of her. I just stare and stare like a schoolboy. I want to speak to her, to introduce myself as her new host and her guardian. I want to seem an urbane man of the world to this cosmopolitan princess. But I gag on words, I can find neither French nor English. I should reproach her for this wanton attempt at escape; but I am struck dumb, as if I am powerless, as if I were horrified by her.

The blazing torches give her a crimson halo, as if she were a burning saint, a fiery saint of red and gold; but the sulphurous smell of the smoke is the very stink of hell. She looks like a being from unearthly regions, neither woman nor boy, a gorgon in her cold forbidding beauty, a dangerous angel. The sight of her, ringed with fire, strange and silent, fills me with wordless terror as if she were some kind of portent, a blazing comet, foretelling my death or disaster. I am most afraid, though I don’t know why, and I stand before her and I can say nothing, like an unwilling disciple terrified into adoration; though I don’t know why.

1568–9, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Bess

Mary, this most troublesome queen, delays as long as she can. Someone has told her that Tutbury Castle is no fit place for a queen of the blood and now Her Grace refuses to come here, and demands to be sent to her good cousin’s court, where she knows well enough that they are celebrating the twelve days of Christmas with feasts and dancing and music, and at the heart of it all will be Queen Elizabeth, with a light heart and light feet, darting around and laughing because the Scots, the greatest threat to the peace of her country, are all falling out amongst themselves, and the greatest rival to her power, the other Queen of England, their queen, is a prisoner without plans for release. Or honoured guest, as I believe I am to call her, as I set about making Tutbury something more than a rapidly improvised dungeon.

I must say that Mary Queen of Scots is not the only one who would rather be at Hampton Court this Christmas season, and can find little joy in the prospect of a long cold winter at Tutbury. I hear from my friends who send me all the gossip that there is a new suitor for Elizabeth’s hand, the Austrian archduke who would ally us with Spain and the Hapsburgs, and Elizabeth is beside herself with the sudden surging of lust for her last chance to be a wife and a mother. I know how the court will be: my friend Robert Dudley will be smiling but guarded – the last thing he wants at court is a rival to his constant courtship of the queen. Elizabeth will be in a fever of vanity, every day will bring new pretty things to her rooms, and her women will rejoice in the spoil of her cast-offs. Cecil will manage everything to the outcome of his choosing, whatever that may be. And I should be there, watching and gossiping with everyone else.

My son Henry, at service in Robert Dudley’s household, writes me that Dudley will never allow a marriage which would displace him from Elizabeth’s side, and that he will oppose Cecil as soon as that old fox shows his hand. But I am for the marriage – any marriage. Pray God that she will have him. She has left it as late as any woman dare, she is thirty-five, dangerously old to give birth to a first child; but she will have to grit her teeth and do it. We have to have a son from her, we have to have an heir to the throne of England. We have to see where we are going.

England is a business, an estate like any other. We have to be able to plan ahead. We have to know who will inherit and what he will get, we have to foresee what he will do with his inheritance. We have to see our next master and know what his plans will be. We have to know whether he will be Lutheran or Papist. Those of us living in rebuilt abbeys and dining off church silver are especially anxious to know this. Please God this time she settles on this suitor, marries him, and gives us a new steady Protestant master for the trade of England.

Elizabeth is a hard mistress to serve, I think, as I command the carpenters to mend the gaps in the floorboards. This would have been our first Christmas at court, for me and my lord the earl. Our first Christmas as newlyweds, the first Christmas I would have been a countess at court, where I should have sparkled like a snowflake and taken great joy in settling old scores from my newly raised position. But instead, the queen allowed my husband the earl only a couple of days with me before dispatching him to Bolton Castle to fetch the Scots Queen while I set to work on this hovel.

The more I repair this half-ruined wreck of a house the more ashamed of it I am, though God knows it is no fault of mine. No house of mine would ever fall into disrepair like this. All of my properties – most of which came to me through the good management of my second husband, William Cavendish – were renovated and rebuilt as soon as we acquired them. We never bought anything without improving it. Cavendish prided himself on parcelling together plots of land and swapping one farm for another till he made a handsome estate, which I would then run at a profit. He was a careful man, a great businessman, an older man, over forty when he married me, his bride of nineteen.

He taught me how to keep an accounts book for our household, and make it up every week, as faithfully as reading a sermon on Sunday. When I was little more than a girl, I used to bring my household book to him like a child with her schoolwork, and he would go through it with me on a Sunday evening, as if we were saying our prayers together, like a pious father and daughter, our heads side by side over the book, our voices murmuring the numbers.

After the first month or so, when he saw that I had such an aptitude and such a love for the figures themselves, as well as the wealth they represented, he let me see the accounts book for the small manor he had just bought, and said that I could keep it too, to see if I would manage it well. I did so. Then, as he bought more properties, I took care of them. I learned the wages of field labourers as well as housemaids, I learned how much we should pay for cartering as well as for washing the windows. I started to run his farms as I ran our house and I kept the books for them all the same.

He taught me that it means nothing to own land or money as the old lords own their estates and waste them from one generation to another. Wealth means nothing at all if you do not know, to the last penny, what your fortune is. You might as well be poor if you do not know what you have. He taught me to love the order of a well-kept accounts book and how the bottom of the page at the end of each week should show the balance between money coming in and money going out; so that you know, and know to a penny, whether you are ahead in the world or behind.

Cavendish told me that this is not how the great lords do it. Many of their stewards do not even keep the books like this, the new way, with receipts and expenses put side by side for comparison, and this is why, at the end of the day, we will do better than them. He told me that they treat their houses and their lands and their tenants and their fortunes as if they were all a great mass that cannot be calculated. So – since this is what they believe – they never try to calculate their wealth. They inherit and pass it on wholesale, without inventory. They lose and gain without keeping account. They have no idea whether a townhouse should rent out at a greater profit than a wheatfield. When they are taxed they guess at what they are worth, when they borrow money they cannot calculate their fortune. When they are paid a huge sum in war, or inherit treasure on marriage, they tumble it into their strongroom and never even list it. Whereas we, the new men and women who have risen so recently, we look at every field, at every trade, at every ship, and we see that it pays for itself.

Slowly, as Cavendish and I added property and houses to our fortune, each one chiselled from the dying body of the old church, I created new books, a new one for each new estate, each one showing a good balance of profit on rents, or sale of wool, or hay or corn or wheat or iron ore, or whatever goods each land could bring to us. Slowly I learned the prices of trees standing in a forest and the value of timber when they were felled. Slowly I learned to estimate the price of wool on a sheep’s back or the profits to be made from a flock of geese at Christmas. My husband Cavendish hired good reliable men who had served the monks in the abbeys and the nuns in the nunneries and knew how lands should yield good rents and revenue, and I set myself to learn from them. Soon it was my task to read the accounts brought to me by the stewards of our growing estates, I was overseer as well as house manager. Soon it was I who knew to the last penny that our properties were well-run and our wealth was increasing.

None of this happened overnight, of course. We were married ten years, we had our children – eight of them, bless them all, and bless the good husband who gave them to me, and the fortune to endow them. He rose high in the favour of the court. He served first Thomas Cromwell and then directly the king. He served in the Court of Augmentations, that prime position, and travelled the country valuing the church properties and turning them over to the Crown, as one after another proved to be unfit for the work of the Lord and better closed down.

And if it happened that the houses that were the richest, and the most profitable, were the first to attract the attention of godly reform, then it was not for us to question the mysterious ways of Providence. If they had been good men they would have been good stewards of the wealth of the Lord and not squandered the church’s fortune: encouraging the poor in idleness, and building churches and hospitals of excessive beauty. Better for God that poor stewards be replaced by those who knew the value of money and were ready to set it to work.

Of course my husband bought on his own account. God knows, everyone in England was buying land on his own account, and at the most desperate prices. It was like the herring fleet coming in, all at once. We were like fishwives on the harbour wall, revelling in a glut. We were all mad to get our hands on our share of the old church lands. It was a banquet of land-grabbing. No-one questioned William as he valued for the Crown and then bought and sold for himself. It was expected by everyone that he should supplement his fees by trading on his own account, and besides, he took no more than was customary.

How did he do it? He valued land low in his own favour, sometimes for the benefit of others. Sometimes he received gifts, and sometimes, secret bribes. Of course! Why not? He was doing the king’s work and furthering the reform of the church. He was doing God’s work in expelling corrupt priests. Why should he not be richly rewarded? We were replacing a rotten old church with one in the true image of His son. It was glorious work. Was my husband not on God’s own work, to destroy the old bad ways of the Papist church? Was he not absolutely right, directed by God Himself, to take wealth away from the corrupt Papal church and put it into our hands, who would use it so much better? Is that not the very meaning of the sacred parable of the talents?

And all the while I was his apprentice, as well as his wife. I came to him a girl with a burning ambition to own my own property and to be secure in the world. Never again would I be a poor relation in the house of a richer cousin. He taught me how I could do it. God bless him.

Then I told him that the Chatsworth estate was for sale, near to my old home of Hardwick in Derbyshire, that I knew it well and it was good land, that the original owner was my cousin but he had sold it to spite his family, that the new owner, frightened by claims against the freehold, was desperate for a sale, that we could make a sharp profit if we were not too particular at taking advantage of a fool in trouble. William saw, as I did, the profit that could be made from it, and he bought it for me at a knockdown price, and swore it would be the greatest house in the North of England, and it would be our new home.

When the new queen, Mary Tudor, came to the throne – and who would have thought she could defeat the good Protestant claimant, my friend Jane Grey? – they accused my poor Cavendish of defrauding his office, of taking bribes, and of stealing land from the Holy Roman Catholic church – which now rose again from the dead like Jesus Himself. Shameful accusations and frightening times: our friends held in the Tower for treason, dearest little Jane Grey facing death for claiming the throne, the reformation of religion utterly reversed, the world turned upside down again, the cardinals returned and the Inquisition coming. But the one thing that I was sure of, the one thing that comforted me through all the worry, was the knowledge that he would know to a penny how much he had stolen. They might say that his books at the palace did not account for the huge fortune he had made, but I knew that he would know; somewhere there would be accounts that would show it all, good and clear, theft and profit. When he died, my poor husband Cavendish, still under suspicion of theft, corruption, and dishonest accounting, I knew that he would make his accounts in heaven, and St Peter (who I supposed would be restored also) would find them exact, to the last penny.

In his absence, it fell to me, his widow, all alone in the world, to defend my inheritance on earth. He had left me everything in my own name, God bless him, for he knew I would keep it safe. Despite every tradition, custom and practice which makes widows paupers and men the only heirs, he put every penny in my name, not even in trust, not to a kinsman. He did not favour a man, any man, over me, his wife. He gave it wholly to me. Think of that! He gave everything to me.

And I swore that I would not betray my dearest Cavendish. I swore, with my hand on his coffin, that I would keep the sacks of gold under the marriage bed, the lands that I had inherited from him, the church candles on my tables and the pictures on my walls, and that I would show my duty to him, as his good widow, by fighting to prove their title as my own. He left his fortune to me; I owed it to him to see that his wishes were honoured. I would make sure that I kept everything. I made it my sacred duty to keep everything.

And then, thank God the claims against me were cut short by another royal death. God Himself preserved my Protestant fortune. Queen Mary the Papist would have clawed back all the church lands if she could have done. She would have had monasteries rebuilt and abbeys re-dedicated, and certainly everything taken back from good officers who were only doing their duty – but God quickly took her to Himself and she died before she could dispossess us all, and the new ruler was our Elizabeth.

Our Elizabeth, the Protestant princess who knows the value of good property as well as the rest of us, who loves, as we do, peace, the land, and a reliable currency. She understands well enough the price of our loyalty to her. We will all be good Protestants and loyal subjects if she will leave us with our stolen Papist wealth, and make sure that no Papist ever gets the throne and threatens our fortunes again.

I had placed myself close to her from the earliest years, both by calculation and preference. I was raised in a Protestant household, in service to the great Lady Frances Grey, I was companion to Lady Jane Grey, and I served a God who recognises hard work. I was at Hatfield when my friend Robert Dudley himself brought the news that the old queen was dead and Elizabeth was the heir. I was at her coronation as a beautiful and wealthy widow (God bless my husband Cavendish for that) and my next husband, Sir William St Loe, was her chief butler of England. I caught his eye on the night of her coronation dinner and knew that he looked at me and saw a pretty woman of thirty, with great lands that marched temptingly beside his own. Dearest Cavendish had left me so prosperous that perhaps I could have made a deal for an even better husband. Sir John Thynne of Longleat was mentioned as one, and there were others. But to tell truth, William St Loe was a handsome man and I liked him for himself. Also, although Sir John has Longleat, which is a house any woman could covet, William St Loe’s lands were in my home country of Derbyshire and that made my heart beat faster.

With him as my husband, and a good Protestant queen on the throne, I knew there would be no questioning the history of a pair of gold candlesticks that once stood on an altar and now my best table. No-one would worry about some three hundred handsome silver forks, a couple of dozen golden ewers, some exquisite Venetian glass, and chests of gold coins which suddenly appeared in the accounts of my household goods. Surely, to the Protestant God whom we all worship and adore, no-one would trouble a loyal widow who has done nothing but love things of beauty that have come her way? There would be no great anxiety about lands that had once belonged to the church and now belong to me. And nor should there be. ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treads the corn,’ my Cavendish used to say to me and sometimes, only half in jest, ‘the Lord helps them who help themselves.’

But neither of us – I swear to Our Lady – neither of us, at our most acquisitive, would have taken Tutbury Castle even as a gift. It will cost more to put right than it would to pull down and start again. I can just imagine my Cavendish looking it over and saying to me: ‘Bess, beloved, a castle is a very fine thing, but where is the profit in it?’ And the two of us would have ridden away to a better investment: something that we could buy cheap and make better.

When I remember Cavendish, I have to marvel at my new husband, the earl. His family have owned half of England for centuries, and leased this property of Tutbury forever; but they have let it get so run down that it is no good for them, nor for any fool that might have taken it off their hands. Of course, my husband the earl has no mind for detail, he has never had to trouble himself with the vulgar questions of profit and loss. After all, he is a nobleman, not a merchant like my Cavendish. He is not on the rise as my Cavendish had to be, as I was then proud to be. My husband the earl has such great lands, he has so many people as servants and tenants and dependants, that he has no idea what profit he makes and what are his costs. Cavendish would have been sick to his heart to do business like this; but it is the noble way. I don’t do it myself; but I know enough to admire it.

Not that there is anything wrong with Tutbury village. The road that winds through it is broad enough and well-enough made. There is a moderately good ale house and an inn that once was clearly a church poorhouse in the old days before someone put in their bid and seized it – though looking at it and the fields around it, I doubt there was a great profit. There are good farms and fertile fields and a river that runs deep and fast. It is low-lying land, not the countryside I love: the steep hills and low valleys of the Derbyshire Peaks. It is all rather flat and dull and Tutbury Castle sits atop its own little mound like a cherry on a pat of syllabub. The road to the castle winds up this little hill like a path up a midden and at the top is a handsome gateway built of good stone and an imposing tower which makes you hope for better; but you are soon disappointed. Inside the curtain wall to the left is a small stone house which all but leans against the damp wall, with a great hall below and privy rooms above, a kitchen and bakehouse on the side. These, if you please, are to be the apartments of the Queen of Scots, who was born in the Castle of Linlithgow and raised in the Chateau of Fontainebleau and may well be a little surprised to find herself housed in a great hall which has next to no daylight in winter and is haunted by the lingering stink of the neighbouring midden.

On the opposite side of the courtyard are the lodgings for the keeper of the castle, where I and my lord are supposed to huddle in a part-stone, part-brick building with a great hall below and lodgings above and – thank God – at least a decent fireplace big enough for a tree at a time. And that is it. None of it in good repair, the stone outer wall on the brink of tumbling into the ditch, the slates loose on every roof, crows’ nests in every chimney. If the queen takes herself up to the top of the tower at the side of her lodgings she can look out over a country as flat as a slab of cheese. There are some thick woods and good hunting to the south but the north is plain and dull. In short, if it were a handsome place I would have pressed my lord to rebuild it and make a good house for us. But he has taken little interest in it and I have none.

Well, I am taking an interest now! Up the hill we toil with my good horses slipping and scrabbling in the slush and the wagoners shouting, ‘Go on! Go on!’ to get them to strain against the traces and haul the carts up the hill. The castle doors are open and we stumble into the courtyard and find the entire household, mouths agape, in dirty clothes, the spit boys without shoes, the stable lads without caps, the whole crew of them looking more like they had just been freed from a Turk’s galley than the staff of a nobleman’s house, waiting to serve a queen.

I jump down from my horse before anyone has the wit to come and help me. ‘Right, you scurvy knaves,’ I say irritably. ‘We have to get this place in order by the end of January. And we are going to start now.’

1569, January, on the journey from Bolton Castle to Tutbury Castle: George

She is a plague and a headache and a woman of whims and fancies, she is a nightmare and a trouble-maker and a great, great queen. I cannot deny that. In every inch of her, in every day, even at her most troublesome, even at her utterly mischievous, she is a great, great queen. I have never met a woman like her before. I have never even seen a queen such as her before. She is an extraordinary creature: moody, mercurial, a thing of air and passion, the first mortal that I have ever met that I can say is indeed truly divine. All kings and queens stand closer to God than ordinary men and women; but this is the first one in my experience who proves it. She is truly touched by God. She is like an angel.

I cannot like her. She is frivolous and whimsical and contrary. One day she begs me to let her gallop over the fields to escape the drudgery of plodding along the muddy road (I have to refuse); then the next she is too ill and too weary to move. She cannot face the cold, she cannot tolerate the icy wind. Her health is fragile, she has a persistent pain in her side. I believe she is frail as any weak woman. But if so, how did she find the courage and the strength to come down the walls of Bolton Castle on a rope? Or ride for three days from a bitter defeat at Langside, Scotland, to Whitehaven, England, three days of dining on nothing but oatmeal, with her hair cropped short as a boy’s for disguise? Riding hard and sleeping rough, with rough soldiers as her companions? What powers can she draw on, that we mere mortals cannot have? It has to be God Himself who gives her this tremendous power and her female nature that undermines her strength with natural delicacy.

I must say, she does not inspire me either to love, or to deep loyalty. I would never trust her with my oath – as I have trusted my own queen. This one is quicksilver: she is all fire and light. A queen who wants to hold her lands needs to be more of the earth. A queen who hopes to survive the hatred that all men naturally have for women who contradict God’s law and set themselves up as leaders has to be a queen like a rock, a thing of the earth. My own queen is rooted in her power. She is a Tudor with all their mortal appetites and earthly greed. My queen Elizabeth is a most solid being, as earthy as a man. But this is a queen who is all air and angels. She is a queen of fire and smoke.

On this journey (which feels as if it will last forever) she is greeted all along the road by people turning out to wave to her, to call their blessings down on her; and it makes a hard journey ten times longer. It amazes me that in midwinter, they would leave their firesides to wait all day at the crossroads of the cold lanes for her small train to come by. Surely they must have heard the scandals about her? Every drinker in every ale house in the kingdom has smacked his lips over the rumours which have somehow spilled out from the inquiries into her character; and yet I have to send orders ahead of us, wherever we go, that they are not to ring the church bells for this queen’s entry into their village, they are not to bring their babies for her blessing, they are not to bring their sick for her to touch against the King’s Evil, they are not to cut green branches and throw them down in the road before her as if she were riding in triumph: as blasphemous as if she were Jesus going into Jerusalem.

But nothing I say prevents them. These Northern superstitious feckless people are besotted with this woman, who is so far removed from them that they might as well love the moon. They honour her as if she were more than a queen, more than an ordinary woman whose reputation is already shadowed by gossip. They honour her as if they knew better than me – as if they knew a higher truth. As if they know her to be, indeed, the angel that she resembles.

It is a matter of faith, not wisdom. These are a stubborn people who don’t agree with the changes that our queen – Elizabeth – has introduced into their churches. I know that they keep the old faith as best they can, and they want a priest in the pulpit and the Mass said in the old ways. Half of them still probably hear the Mass behind closed doors on a Sunday and none the wiser. They would rather have their faith and their God and their sense of Our Lady watching over all of them than obey the new ever-changing laws of the land. The whole of the North has always been determinedly unimpressed by the reform of religion, and now that this other queen is riding down their lanes, they are showing their true colours: their loyalty to her, their constancy to their faith. They are hers, heart and soul, and I do not know if Cecil had considered this when he ordered me to move her to Tutbury. I don’t know if he understands how little sway Queen Elizabeth, and her faith, has in these northern counties. Perhaps he should have taken her further south? But perhaps everywhere she goes she will be passionately loved? There are Papists, God knows, everywhere in England, perhaps half the country believes that this is our true queen, and the other half will love her when they see her.

This queen, as equally famous for her piety as she is notorious for her lust, wears a rosary at her belt and a crucifix at her throat where I sometimes see her blush rise; she flushes pink like a girl. The Pope himself prays for her by name as she rides through mortal peril. At the worst moments, when we are half-mobbed by a crowd of people quietly whispering blessings on her, I am afraid they would prefer her on the throne and the church unreformed and unchanged than all the benefits that Queen Elizabeth has brought them.

Because these are not people like my Bess – middling people who saw their chance and snatched at profits in the times of change; these are the poor who used to go to the abbey for their hurts and their fears, who liked the priest coming to them for their deathbeds and christenings. They don’t like the churches pulled down, the sanctuaries made unsafe, the nuns with their healing hospitals driven away. They don’t know where to pray, now that the shrines have been destroyed, they don’t know who will help them now they cannot light a candle for a saint. They don’t understand that holy water is not holy any more, that the stoops are dry. They don’t know where they can claim sanctuary now that the abbeys are closed, they don’t know who will feed them in time of need now that the abbey kitchens are destroyed, and the kitchen fires gone cold. Barren women cannot go on pilgrimage to a sacred well, sick men cannot hobble to a shrine. They know themselves to be bereft. Undeniably, they have been robbed of much that made their lives happier. And they think that this exquisite other queen, dressed in black with a veil of white, as seductive as a novice nun, will bring back all the good things for them, and they crowd around her and tell her that good times will come again, that she must wait, as they will wait for her, until I have to shout at the guard to push them away.

Perhaps it is no more than the trivial matter of her beauty. People are so foolish over a beautiful woman, they attribute all sorts of magic to her for nothing more than the set of her dark eyes and the thickness of her dark eyelashes. They come to the roadside to stare for curiosity and then they stay and call blessings on her in the hopes of seeing her smile. She raises her hand in thanks; I have to say, she does have extraordinary grace. She smiles at each and every one of them as a private greeting. Everyone who sees her is besotted: hers for life. She has such a presence that nobody ever asks me which of the women in the travelling cloaks in the queen. She is slim like a thoroughbred horse; but tall, tall as a man. She carries herself like a queen and every eye is drawn to her. When she rides by, there is a whisper of admiration like a breeze, and this adoration has blown around her all her life. She carries her beauty like a crown and she laughs and gives a little shrug at the constant admiration she attracts, as if it is a cloak that someone has dropped: ermine, around her pale shoulders.

They throw evergreen leaves down on the road before her since they don’t have flowers in this wintry season. At every stop someone presses pots of honey and preserves on us for her pleasure. The women bring out rosaries for her to touch as if she were a saint, and I have to look the other way, for the rosaries themselves are against the law now. Or at any rate, I think so. The laws change so often I can’t always keep up. My own mother had a rosary of coral, and my father had a candle lit before a marble crucifix every day of his life; but Bess keeps these hidden in our treasure room now, jumbled up with the icons her previous husband stole from the abbeys. Bess treats them all as profitable goods. She does not think of them as sacred, Bess does not think of anything as sacred. This is the new way.

But when we pass a roadside shrine where a statue or a crucifix once stood, there is now a candle new-set and burning with a brave little light as if to say that the statue may be broken and the crucifix thrown down; but the light on the road and the flame in the heart still burn. She insists on pausing before these empty shrines to bow her head and I cannot hurry her because there is something about her in prayer … something about the turn of her head, as if she is listening as well as praying. I cannot make myself interrupt these brief communions though I know that when people see her, it just encourages Papacy and superstition. I can see that these little prayers strengthen her as if someone – who? Her mother? Her lost husband? Perhaps even her namesake, the very Mother of God? – is speaking to her in the silence.

How should I know? I am a man who simply follows my king. When my king is a Papist, I am a Papist. When he is a Protestant, I am a Protestant, if he became a Mussulman I suppose I would do so too. I don’t think of these things. I have never thought of these things. I pride myself in being a man who does not think about such things. My family do not struggle for their faith, we remain faithful to the king and his God is our God. But when I see her face illuminated by the candle from a roadside icon and her smile so rapt … well, in truth, I don’t know what I see. If I were foolish like the common people I would think I see the touch of God. I would think I see a woman who is as beautiful as an angel, because she is an angel, an angel on earth, as simple as that.

Then she laughs in my face some evenings, feckless as the girl she is. ‘I am a great trial to you,’ she says, speaking French. ‘Don’t deny it! I know it and I am sorry for it. I am a great trouble to you, Lord Shrewsbury.’

She cannot pronounce my name at all. She speaks like a Frenchwoman; you would never know that her father was a Scot. She can say ‘the earl’ well enough. She can manage ‘Talbot’; but ‘Shrewsbury’ utterly defeats her. She puckers up her mouth into a kissing pout to attempt it. It comes out ‘Chowsbewwy’ and it is so funny that it almost makes me laugh. She is charming; but I remember that I am married to a woman of great worth and I serve a queen of solid merit.

‘Not at all,’ I say coldly, and I see her girl’s smile falter.

1569, January, on the journey from Bolton Castle to Tutbury Castle: Mary

Bothwell,

They are moving me to a new castle, Tutbury, near Burton-on-Trent. I shall be the guest of the Earl of Shrewsbury but I am not free to leave. Come as soon as you can get free.

Marie

I keep my head down and I ride like a nun on her way to Mass but everywhere I go, I am taking in everything. I ride as Bothwell the tactician taught me to ride: constantly on the lookout for ambush, for opportunity, for danger, mapping the land in my mind as he would. This England is my kingdom, my inheritance, and these Northern lands will be my especial stronghold. I don’t need secret letters from my ambassador, the good Bishop John Lesley of Ross, to tell me that half the country is mine already, longing to be rid of the tyranny of the usurper, my cousin Elizabeth; for everywhere I go, I see that the common people want to go back to the old ways, the good ways, they want the church restored and a queen that they can trust on the throne.

If it were the common people alone I would take their praise and their gifts and smile my thanks and know that they can do nothing; but it is so much more than them. At every stop on the road, when the wine comes in for dinner, a server drops a message into my lap or palms me a note. Shrewsbury is a hopeless guardian, bless him. He watches the door but forgets all about the windows. Half a dozen lords of England have sent me assurances that they will never let me be held captive, that they will never let me be sent back to Scotland as a prisoner, that they have vowed to set me free. They will make Elizabeth honour her word to restore me to my throne, or they will challenge her in my name. There is a conspiracy against Elizabeth smouldering, like a fire in heather, spreading, hidden at the very roots. In hesitating to restore me to my throne she has gone too far for her court to support. They all know that I am her only legitimate heir; and they all want me to be secure of my kingdom in Scotland and assured of my inheritance in England. This is nothing more than simple justice, this is my right; and the English nobility as well as the commoners want to defend my right. Any English queen of any sense would make this clear for me, clear for her lords, clear for her country. Any queen of any sense would name me as her heir and put me back on the throne of Scotland and order me to bide my time until her death. If she would treat me fairly like this, I would honour her.

For many of them Elizabeth is a pretender to the throne, a Protestant bastard who has played on her Tudor-red hair and my absence to put herself where I should be. All of Europe and half of England accept that I am the true heir, descended in a straight and legitimate line from King Henry VII, whereas she is an acknowledged bastard, and worse: a known traitor to the queen who went before her, the sacred Mary Tudor.

It is a tricky path I have to tread. No-one would blame me if I escaped from this compulsory hospitality. But everyone, even my own family, even Elizabeth’s enemies, would condemn me if I raised a riot in her kingdom. She too would be within her rights to accuse me of troublemaking, even treason, if I made a rebellion against her; and I dare not risk that. These lords must be led on to free me, for I must be free. But they must do it of their own choice. I cannot encourage them to rebel against their crowned sovereign. In truth: nor would I. Who believes more strongly than I that an anointed queen should reign? A legitimate sovereign cannot be questioned.

‘But is she a legitimate sovereign?’ Mary Seton, my companion, asks me slyly, knowing that she is only repeating my old words back to me, as we rest one evening in a poor inn on the road to Tutbury.

‘She is,’ I say firmly. At any rate, when we are in her lands and with no power of our own, we will treat her as such.

‘The child of Anne Boleyn, conceived outside wedlock when the king was married to a Catholic princess,’ she reminds me. ‘Declared a bastard by her own father, and that law never revoked. Not even by her … as if she is afraid to ask the question … Heir to the throne only because the king named her on his deathbed, after his son, after his legitimate daughter, the desperate last words of a frightened man.’

I turn away from her to the fire and push the most recent note, a promise of help from Mary’s faithful brother, Lord Seton, to the back of the logs and watch it burn. ‘Whatever she is, whatever her mother was, even whatever her father – even if he was Mark Smeaton a singer – nonetheless she is an anointed queen now,’ I say firmly. ‘She found a bishop who could bring himself to crown her, and as such she is sacred.’

‘All but one of her bishops refused. The whole church but one Judas denied her. Some of them went to prison rather than crown her. Some of them died for their faith, and died denying her. They called her a usurper, a usurper on your throne.’

‘Peut-être. But she is on it now, and I will never, never be a party to overthrow an ordained queen. God has allowed her to be queen, for whatever reason. She has been anointed with sacred oil, she has the crown on her head and the orb and sceptre in her hand. She is untouchable. I shall not be the one to throw her down.’

‘God has made her queen but not authorised her to be a tyrant,’ Mary observes quietly.

‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘So she may rule her kingdom but she may not tyrannise over me. I will be free.’

‘Amen to that,’ Mary says devoutly. I look at the scrap of paper falling to ash in the red heart of the embers.

‘I will be free,’ I repeat. ‘Because, in the end, no-one has the power to imprison me. I was born, bred, crowned, anointed, and wed to a king. No-one in Christendom is more a queen than I. No-one in the world is more of a queen than I. Only God Himself is above me. Only He can command me, and His command is that I must be free and take my throne.’

1569, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Bess

We do it. I do it. By using the men I have brought from Chatsworth – good men who have served me well, who know how I like things done – by using the hard-working women that I recruit from Tutbury and train into doing things my way, by scattering around the handsome things I have brought from Chatsworth, by patching and nailing and cleaning and thatching as best we can. By hanging tapestries over damp plaster, by lighting fires in blocked chimneys and burning out vermin, by glazing some windows and blocking up others, by curtaining doorways and hammering down loose floorboards; in the end we make a place that, if not fit for a queen, cannot be – of itself – grounds for complaint. The queen herself, Queen Elizabeth, sends me goods from the Tower for the extra comfort of her cousin. Second-rate I have to say, but anything which makes these dark empty rooms look a little less like a dungeon and more like a house must be regarded as a vast improvement.

It is a great job of work that I and my workmen have done. I don’t expect thanks for it, a nobleman like my husband the earl thinks that houses build themselves, sweep their own floors, and furniture strolls in and arranges itself. But I take a pleasure and a pride in my work. Others in this kingdom build ships and plan ventures far away, raid like pirates, discover new countries and bring back wealth. My work is closer to home. I build, I establish, I run at a profit. But whether it is Sir Francis Drake’s work or mine, it is alike; it is all in the service of the Protestant God, and my clean floor and the gold in my purse both honour His Holy Name.

The waiting, the feverish preparation, the arrival of the queen’s own goods all build to a sense of such anxiety that when the lad I have posted at the top of the tower yells out: ‘I see them! They are coming!’ the whole household takes to their heels as if they feared a Spanish invasion instead of one young queen. I can feel my stomach lurch as if I had the flux, and I take off the sacking I have tied at my waist to protect my gown, and I go down to the courtyard to greet this unwanted guest.

It is snowing again, just a flurry, but she has her hood pulled forward over her head to shield herself from the bitter weather, so all I see at first is a big horse and a woman huddled in cloaks in the saddle. My husband is riding at her side and I have an odd, actually, a very odd feeling, when I see him lean towards her as the horses halt. He inclines towards her, as if he would save her the least discomfort or trouble, he looks as if he would spare her the cold wind if he could; and I have a moment when I think that in our businesslike courtship, our well-advised marriage and our cheerful consummation in the big marital bed, that he has never yearned towards me as if he thinks I am fragile, as if he desires to protect me, as if I need protection.

Because I am not. Because I don’t. And I have always been proud of this.

I shake my head to clear such folly and I go briskly forward. My Chatsworth master of horse is holding her horse’s head, and my steward is holding her stirrup. ‘Welcome to Tutbury, Your Grace,’ I say.

It is odd to say ‘Your Grace’ to a young woman again. Elizabeth has been the only queen in England for ten years. She and I have grown old together, I am forty-one, she is thirty-five years old now; and here is a young woman, in her mid-twenties, with an equal claim to the title. She is a queen in her own right in Scotland, she is heir to the throne of England, some would even argue she is the true Queen of England. There are two queens in England now: the one who holds the throne by our good will, and the other one who probably deserves it; and I am in the odd position of being in the service of them both.

My husband the earl is down from his horse already, and he turns to her without even greeting me – as he should do, as is right and proper, though it feels a little odd to me, a newly wed wife. She reaches both arms out to him and he lifts her down from the saddle. Watching the thoughtless ease they have in this embrace reminds me that he has probably lifted her down every noon and night for the ten days of this journey. She must be light as a child, for he swings her down easily, as if in a dance. I know that I would be more of a weight for him. She turns to greet me while still in his arms, one hand casually on his shoulder, as she extends her other hand in the soft leather glove, and I curtsey low.

‘Thank you,’ she says. Her voice is musical, she speaks English like a Frenchwoman – that accent which is the very sound of perfidy and glamour to honest English ears. ‘I thank you for your welcome, Lady Shrewsbury.’

‘Please come in,’ I say, hiding my smile at her pronunciation of Shrewsbury, which is really ridiculously affected. She sounds like an infant learning to talk with her ‘Chowsbewwy’. I gesture towards her lodgings. An anxious glance from my husband asks me if the place is habitable and I give him a little nod. He can trust me. I am a partner in this venture, as I am a partner in this marriage. I shall not fail him, nor he me.

There is a fire in her great hall and she goes towards it and sits herself in the big wooden chair that is drawn close to the blaze for her comfort. Since the wind is in the east the chimney will not blow back a buffet of wood-smoke, please God, and she must admire the table before her, which is spread with a fine Turkey carpet and my best gold abbey candlesticks. The tapestries on the walls are of the very best, woven by nuns, thank God for them, and in her bedroom she will find the bed curtains are of cloth of gold and the coverlet of the richest red velvet which once graced the bed of a most senior churchman.

Everywhere is bright and warm, lit by the great square wax candles that are hers by right of being a queen, and in the sconces against the stone walls there are torches burning. She puts back the hood of her cape and I see her for the first time.

I gasp. I can’t help myself. Truly, I gasp at the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life. She has a face like a painting, as an artist might draw. She has the face of an angel. She has thick black hair, cropped like a boy’s, but sparkling at the front now with melting snow. She has dark arched eyebrows and eyelashes so long they sweep her cheeks. Her eyes are dark, dark and clear, and her skin is like porcelain, white and smooth without a single flaw. Her face is perfect like the carving of an angel, a serene heartless face; but what makes her remarkable, unlike anyone I have ever seen before, is her charm. She turns a smile on me and suddenly she is luminous, like a shaft of sunlight, like a sparkle on water, she is like some beautiful thing that makes your heart lift for the mere joy of it. Like the swoop of a swallow in flight which makes you feel glad to be alive. Her smile is like that, is my first foolish thought, her smile is like the swoop of a swallow in flight in midsummer dusk. My second thought is that Queen Elizabeth will hate her like poison.

‘This is a most kind welcome,’ she says in French, then sees my frown as I can’t understand her and she says in hesitant English: ‘You are kind, thank you.’ She holds out her hands to the blaze and then she stands up. Quietly, her lady-in-waiting comes forward and unties the furs at her neck and slips off her wet cloak. She nods her thanks. ‘Lady Shrewsbury, may I present my ladies-in-waiting? This is Lady Mary Seton, and here is Lady Agnes Livingstone,’ she says, and the women and I curtsey to each other and I nod to one of my servants to take the wet cloak away.

‘May I offer you some refreshment?’ I say. I left Derbyshire when I was a girl and I have studied my speech ever since; but even so my voice seems too loud, uncouth in the room. Damn it, I have lived in the greatest houses of the land. I have served Queen Elizabeth and I count Robert Dudley and William Cecil as my personal friends, but I could bite my tongue when I hear the words come out of my mouth clotted with the Derbyshire burr. I flush with embarrassment. ‘Would you like a glass of wine or a mulled ale against the cold?’ I ask, taking extra care with my speech and sounding now stilted and false.

‘Now, what do you like?’ She turns to me as if she is truly interested in my tastes.

‘I’d have a glass of mulled ale,’ I say. ‘I brought it from my brew-house at Chatsworth.’

She smiles. Her teeth are small and sharp, like a kitten’s. ‘Parfait! Let’s have that then!’ she says, as if this is to be a delightful treat. ‘Your husband, his lordship, has told me you are a great manager of your houses. I am sure that you have everything that is the very best.’

I nod to the groom of the servery and know that he will bring everything. I smile at George, who has thrown off his own travelling cloak and is standing at the fireside. We both of us will stand until she invites us to sit, and seeing George, an earl in his own house, standing like a lad before his master, I realise for the first time that we have not allowed a guest into our house but rather that we have joined the court of a queen, and that from now on everything will have to be done as she wishes, and not how I prefer.

1569, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Mary

‘And what d’you think of my lady Bess?’ Mary Seton asks me, speaking French for greater discretion, a hint of malice in her voice. ‘Is she as you expected? Worse?’

Now they are gone and we are alone in these pitiful little rooms I can lean back in my chair and let the pain and exhaustion seep through my body. The ache in my side is especially bad tonight. Mary kneels at my feet and unties the laces on my boots and gently pulls them off my cold feet.

‘Oh, I heard so much about what a woman of sense she is and what a grand manager of business that I was expecting a Florentine banker at the very least,’ I say, turning the criticism.

‘She won’t be like Lady Scrope at Bolton Castle,’ Mary warns me. She puts my boots to dry at the fireside and sits back on her heels. ‘I don’t think she has any sympathy for you and your cause. Lady Scrope was a good friend.’

I shrug. ‘Her ladyship thought I was the heroine of a fairytale,’ I say irritably. She was one of those who sees me as a queen of ballads. A tragic queen with a beautiful childhood in France and then a lonely widowhood in Scotland. A balladeer would describe me married to the beautiful weakling Darnley, but longing for a strong man to rescue me. A troubadour would describe me as doomed from the moment of my birth, a beautiful princess born under a dark star. It doesn’t matter. People always make up stories about princesses. It comes to us with the crown. We have to carry it as lightly as we can. If a girl is both beautiful and a princess, as I have been all my life, then she will have adherents who are worse than enemies. For most of my life I have been adored by fools and hated by people of good sense, and they all make up stories about me in which I am either a saint or a whore. But I am above these judgements, I am a queen. ‘I expect no sympathy from her ladyship,’ I say bitterly. ‘She is my cousin the queen’s most trusted servant, as is the earl. Otherwise we would not be housed by them. I am sure she is hopelessly prejudiced against me.’

‘A staunch Protestant,’ Mary warns me.‘Brought up in the Brandon family, companion to Lady Jane Grey, I am told. And her former husband made his fortune from the ruin of the monasteries. They say that every bench in her house is a pew.’

I say nothing; but the small incline of my head tells her to go on.

‘That husband served Thomas Cromwell in the Court of Augmentations,’ she continues softly. ‘And made a fortune.’

‘There would be a great profit in the destruction of the religious houses and the shrines,’ I say thoughtfully. ‘But I thought it was the king who took the profit.’

‘They say that Bess’s husband took his fee for the work, and then some more,’ she whispers. ‘He took bribes from the monks to spare their houses, or to undervalue them. That he took a fee for winking when treasure was smuggled out. But then he went back later and threw them out anyway, and took all the treasure they thought they had saved.’

‘A hard man,’ I observe.

‘She was his sole heir,’ she tells me. ‘She had him change his will so that he disinherited his own brother. He did not even leave money to his children by her. When he died he left every penny of his ill-gained wealth to her, in her name alone, and set her up as a lady. It was from his springboard that she could vault to marry her next husband, and she did the same with him: took everything he owned, disinherited his own kin. At his death he left it all to her. That is how she got enough wealth to be a countess: by seducing men and taking them from their families.’

‘So – a woman of few scruples,’ I remark, thinking of a mother disinheriting her own children. ‘A woman who is the greater power in the household, who has things done to her own advantage.’

‘A forward woman,’ Mary Seton says disapprovingly. ‘Without respect for her husband and his family. A crowing hen. But a woman who knows the value of money.’ She is thinking as I am – that a woman who does not scruple to make her fortune from the destruction of the church of God can surely be bribed to look the other way just once, for just one night.

‘And him? The Earl of Shrewsbury?’

I smile. ‘D’you know, I think he is all but untouchable? All he seems to care for is his own honour and his dignity; and of all men in England, he must be safe in that.’

1569, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Bess

‘How much are we being paid for her?’ I ask George as we take a glass of spiced wine seated either side of our bedroom fire. Behind us the maids are turning down our bed for the night.

He gives a little start and I realise that I am, once again, too blunt. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I say quickly. ‘Only I need to know for my book of accounts. Is the court to pay us a fee?’

‘Her Majesty the Queen graciously assured me that she will meet all the costs,’ he says.

‘All of them?’ I ask. ‘Are we to send her a note of our expenses, monthly?’

He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Bess, dearest wife … this is an honour; to serve is a privilege that many seek but only we were chosen. The queen has assured me that she will provide. Of course we will benefit from our service to her. She has sent goods from her own household for her cousin, has she not? We have the queen’s own furniture in our house?’

‘Yes,’ I say hesitantly, hearing the pride in his voice. ‘But really, it is only some old things from the Tower. William Cecil wrote to me that Queen Mary’s household is supposed to be thirty people?’

My husband nods.

‘She has come here with at least sixty.’

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Has she?’

For some reason, known only to men and in this instance a nobleman, he has ridden at the head of a train of a hundred people for ten days and failed to notice.

‘Well, they don’t all expect to be housed here, I suppose?’

‘Some of them have gone to the ale house in the village; but her household – companions, retainers, servants and the grooms – are under our roof, and they are all eating and drinking at our expense.’

‘She has to be served as a queen,’ he says. ‘She is a queen to her fingertips, don’t you think, Bess?’

It is undeniable. ‘She is a beauty,’ I say. ‘I always thought they must be exaggerating when they spoke of her as the most beautiful queen in the world; but she is all of that, and more. She would be beautiful if she were a commoner, but the way she carries herself and her grace …’ I hesitate. ‘Do you like her very much?’

The gaze he turns to me is totally innocent, he is surprised by the question. ‘Like her? I hadn’t thought. Er, no, she is too …’ He breaks off. ‘She is troubling. She is challenging. Everywhere we go she has been a centre for treason and heresy. How can I like her? She has brought me nothing but difficulty.’

I hide my pleasure. ‘And do you have any idea how long she will stay with us?’

‘She will go home to Scotland this summer,’ he says. ‘The inquiry has cleared her of any wrongdoing; our queen is certain that there is nothing against her. Indeed, she seems to have suffered much injustice. And her lords put themselves utterly in the wrong by holding her prisoner, and making her abdicate her throne. We cannot tolerate this in a neighbour. To throw down a queen is to overthrow the natural order. We dare not let them do it. It is to go against the order of God. She has to be restored and the rebels punished.’

‘Will we escort her home?’ I ask. I am thinking of a royal progress to Edinburgh, of the castles and the court.

‘Our queen will have to send an army to secure her safety. But the lords have agreed to her return. Her marriage to Bothwell will be annulled and they will bring her husband Lord Darnley’s murderers to trial.’

‘She will be queen in Scotland again?’ I ask. ‘Despite Cecil?’ I try to keep the doubt from my voice but I shall be very surprised if that arch plotter has an enemy queen in his hands and quietly sends her home in comfort, with an army to help her.

‘What has Cecil to do with it?’ he asks me, deliberately obtuse. ‘I don’t think that Cecil can determine who is of royal blood, though he thinks to command everything else.’

‘He cannot want her restored to power,’ I say quietly. ‘He has worked for years to put Scotland under English command. It has been the policy of his life.’

‘He cannot prevent it,’ he says. ‘He has no authority. And it will be something then, my Bess, for us to be the dearest friends of the Queen of Scotland, don’t you think?’

I wait for the two girls to finish turning down the bed, curtsey and leave the room. ‘And of course, she is heir to England,’ I say quietly. ‘If Elizabeth returns her to Scotland she is acknowledging her as queen and her cousin, and so it is to acknowledge her as the heir. So she will be our queen here, one day, I suppose. If Elizabeth has no child.’

‘God save the queen,’ George says at once. ‘Queen Elizabeth, I mean. She is not old, she is healthy she is not yet forty. She could yet marry and have a son.’

I shrug. ‘The Queen of Scots is a fertile woman of twenty-six. She is likely to outlive her cousin.’

‘Hush,’ he says.

Even in the privacy of our bedroom, between two loyal English subjects it is treason to discuss the death of the queen. Actually, it is treason to even say the words ‘death’ and ‘queen’ in the same sentence. We have become a country where words have to be watched for betrayal. We have become a country where you can hang for grammar.

‘Do you think the Scots queen is truly innocent of the murder of Lord Darnley?’ I ask him. ‘You saw the evidence, are you sure she was not guilty?’

He frowns. ‘The inquiry closed without a decision,’ he says. ‘And these things are not a matter for women’s gossip.’

I bite my tongue on an irritable reply. ‘It is not for gossip that I ask you,’ I say respectfully. ‘It is for the safety and honour of your house.’ I pause. He is listening now. ‘If she is the woman that they say – a woman who would murder her husband in cold blood and then marry the man who did the deed for her own power and safety – then there is no reason to think that she would not turn against us, if it was in her interest to do so. I don’t want my cellars packed with gunpowder one dark night.’

He looks aghast. ‘She is a guest of the Queen of England, she will be restored to her own throne. How can you think that she would attack us?’

‘Because if she is as bad as everyone says, then she is a woman who will stop at nothing to gain her way.’

‘There is no doubt in my mind that Lord Darnley, her own husband, was in a plot against her. He had joined with the rebel lords and was guided by her half-brother, Lord Moray. I think together they planned to throw her down and imprison her and put him as king consort on the throne. Her half-brother would have ruled through Darnley. He was a weak creature, they all knew that.’

I nod. I knew Darnley from a boy, a boy horridly spoiled by his mother, in my opinion.

‘The lords loyal to the queen made a plot to kill Darnley, Bothwell probably among them.’

‘But did she know?’ I demand. It is the key question: is she a husband-killer?

He sighs. ‘I think not,’ he says fairly. ‘The letters that show her ordering the deed are certainly forgeries, the others are uncertain. But she was in and out of the house while they were putting the gunpowder in the cellar, surely she would not have taken the risk if she had known of the danger. She had planned to sleep there that night.’

‘So why marry Bothwell?’ I demand. ‘If he was one of the plotters? Why reward him?’

‘He kidnapped her,’ my loyal husband says quietly, almost in a whisper. He is so ashamed by the shame of the queen. ‘That seems certain. She was seen to be taken by him without her consent. And when they came back to Edinburgh he led her horse by the bridle so that everyone could see she was his captive and innocent of a conspiracy with him.’

‘Then why marry him?’ I persist. ‘Why did she not arrest him as soon as she was safe in her castle and throw him on the scaffold?’

He turns away, he is a modest man. I can see his ears going red from a blush. He cannot meet my eyes. ‘He did not just kidnap her,’ he says, his voice very quiet. ‘We think he raped her and she was with child by him. She must have known herself to be utterly ruined as a woman and a queen. The only thing she could do was to marry him and pretend that it was by consent. That way at least she kept her authority though she was ruined.’

I give a little gasp of horror. A queen’s person is sacred, a man has to be invited to kiss her hand. A physician is not allowed to examine her, whatever her need. To abuse a queen is like spitting on a holy icon; no man of conscience would dare to do it. And for the queen to be held and forced would be like having the shell of her sanctity and power broken into pieces.

For the first time, I feel pity for this queen. I have thought of her so long as a monster of heresy and vanity that I have never thought of her, little more than a girl, trying to rule a kingdom of wolves, forced in the end to marry the worst of them. ‘Dear God, you would never know to look at her. How does she bear it? It is a wonder that her spirit is not broken.’

‘So you see, she will be no danger to us,’ he says. ‘She was a victim of their plotting, not one of the plotters. She is a young woman in much need of friends and a place of safety.’

There is a tap at the door to tell me that my private household is assembled in our outer chamber, ready for prayers. My chaplain is already among them. I have household prayers said every night and morning. George and I go through to join them, my head still spinning, and we kneel on the cushions that I have embroidered myself. Mine has a map of my beloved Derbyshire, George’s shows his family crest, the talbot. All of my household, from pageboy to steward, kneel on their cushions and bow their heads as the chaplain recites the prayers for the evening. He prays in English so that everyone may speak to God together in language that we all understand. He prays for the kingdom of God and for the kingdom of England. He prays for the glory of heaven and the safety of the queen. He prays for my lord and for me and for all these souls in our care. He thanks God for the gifts we enjoy, as a result of Elizabeth on the throne and the Protestant bible in the churches. This is a godly Protestant household and twice a day we thank God who has rewarded us so richly for being His people, the best Protestants in Christendom. And so we remind everyone – me as well – of the great rewards that come from being a godly Protestant household in the direct charge of a Protestant God.

This is a lesson that the Catholic queen may learn from me. We Protestants have a God who rewards us directly, richly, and at once. It is by our wealth, our success and our power that we know that we are the chosen. Who can doubt God’s goodness to me, when they see my house at Chatsworth, now three storeys high? Who, if they saw my accounts books with the figures marching so strongly down to the bottom line, could doubt that I am one of the chosen, one of the specially favoured Children of God?

1569, Spring, Tutbury Castle: George

I am surprised to have no instructions yet from the queen to prepare for the journey to Scotland, though I look for a command every day. I had expected by now to have been ordered to prepare a great escort to take the Queen of Scots home. In the absence of any message, the days go on, the weather improves, and we are starting to live together as a household, a royal household. It is a great honour and I have to remind myself not to become overproud of the good management of my wife and the lineage of my guest. She seems to be enjoying her visit with us, and I cannot help but be glad that we are her hosts in England. What benefits may flow from this friendship I would not stoop to calculate, I am not a paid companion. But of course, it goes without saying, that to be the trusted and most intimate friend of the next Queen of England has to be an advantage, even to a family already well established.

I receive a note, not from the queen herself, but from Cecil, who tells me that we must hold the other queen for only a few days longer while the Scots negotiate for her safe return to her kingdom and her throne. Then she will leave. The Scots have agreed that they will have her back as queen and she will return to her country with honour, this very month.

The relief for me is tremendous. Even though I know that our inquiry cleared her, and the queen herself is defending her cousin’s name, I was anxious for her. She is so young, and without advisors. She has neither father nor husband to defend her, and she has such enemies ranged against her! And the more time I spend with her the more I hope for her safety, even for her success. She has a way – I have never known such a woman before – she has a way of making everyone feel that they would like to serve her. Half of my household is openly in love with her. If I were a bachelor, or a younger man, or a fool outright, I would say that she is enchanting.

The same messenger from London brings me a packet from Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and I open it slowly. He has such a passionate opposition to the growing power of Cecil, to the fearful England that Cecil is making, that I think this may be the invitation to be part of some plot against the Secretary of State. If he is inviting me to join against Cecil I will be hard put to refuse him. Indeed, in honour, I think I cannot refuse him. The man has to be curbed if not stopped outright and we lords are the ones who will have to do it. For a moment I consider going to find Bess so that we can read his letter together. But then curiosity is too much for me and I open it. A sealed package falls from the inside, into my hands with this note:

Shrewsbury, please convey this letter to the Queen of Scots. It is a proposal of marriage from me and has the blessing of all the other lords. I trust to your discretion. I have not yet told Her Grace the Queen of my intention; but Leicester, Arundel and Pembroke all think this a good solution to the current difficulty, returning her to her throne with an English connection and preventing a foreign husband. It was suggested by the Scots lords themselves, as a way to guarantee her safe return with a reliable Protestant Englishman at her side. I hope she will marry me. I believe it to be her safest route, indeed her only route,

Norfolk.

I think I had better take this to Bess.

1569, Spring, Tutbury Castle: Bess

Our days have fallen into a rhythm dictated by the queen, who rules this castle as her own palace, as I suppose she should. In the morning she prays and hears Mass in her own way with her secretary who, I imagine, is an ordained priest. I am supposed not to know, and so I do not ask, though I am required to give him four square meals a day and fish on Friday.

I have made sure that my household know that they are not to join nor even to listen to the heresies that take place behind the closed doors of her lodgings, and so I hope to confine the confusion and distress that always follows the rule of Rome to her rooms. But once she has done with heretical mutterings, and taken her breakfast in her rooms, she likes to ride out accompanied by my husband the earl. She has ten horses that are taking up ten loose boxes in our stables, and are feeding well on our oats. She rides with my lord and his guard in the morning while I go to the small parlour that I have set aside for my business and I meet with the stewards of all my houses and ventures who report to me either by letter or, when there is trouble, in person.

This is a system of my own devising, based on my first lessons from my dear Cavendish with the housekeeping books. Each manor, each house has its own book, each has to meet its own costs. By treating each parcel of land as a separate kingdom I make sure that they each make money. It may seem obvious – but this is unique. I know no other landlord who does it. Unlike me, my lord’s stewards who work in the old ways bundle all their accounts together, use land as security against loans for cash, endow it, buy it, sell it, mortgage it and entail it away on heirs. At best they can always keep my lord’s treasure room rich with cash; but at worst they never know what is earned and what is borrowed and what is owed. Badly handled, a whole fortune can slip through the fingers of a landlord and go out of the family altogether. They can never know if they are in profit or loss, there is a continual exchange of land into debt, into cash, and back to land again. The value of the land changes, even the value of the currency changes, and this is beyond their control – they can never know for sure what is happening. This is the way that the nobility run their business, grandly but vaguely; whereas I run mine like a poor woman’s household and know to a penny what I am worth at the end of every week. Of course, they start with an enormous fortune. All they have to do is not to squander their wealth, whereas I started from nothing and nothing is easily counted. But a landlord like me – a newcomer – has to watch every penny and every acre, has to be alert to every change. It is a different view of the land, and my view is a novelty. Never before was there a landlord in England like me. Never in the world, for all I know, was there a woman in business like me.

Only a trader at his stall, only a cobbler at his last, would understand the pleasure I have at knowing the cost of things, and the profit from things, and the balancing of the books. Only a woman who has been poor would know the heartfelt sense of relief that comes from looking at the household accounts books and seeing a profit. There is nothing that warms my heart more than knowing that I am safe in my house, with cash in my treasure room, with land at my doorstep, and my children endowed or well married. Nothing in the world is better for me than the sense that I have money in my purse and that no-one can rob me.

This should be a strength of course, but it means that any loss strikes me hard. For within the first week of having the Scots queen as our guest, I have a letter from the Lord Treasurer’s office telling me that we will be paid fifty-two pounds a week for hosting the Queen of Scots. Fifty-two pounds! A week!

After my initial dismay I cannot say that I am surprised. Anyone who has served at court knows that Queen Elizabeth is as mean with her money as when she was a bankrupt princess. She was brought up as a girl who was sometimes heir, sometimes pauper, and it has left her with a terrible habit of penny pinching. She is as bad as I am for keeping watch over a groat. She is worse than me, for it is her trade as queen to be generous; whereas it is my trade as a subject to turn a profit.

I look at the letter again. I calculate that she is offering us about a quarter of what we are paying out at present for the pleasure of housing and entertaining our guest. They, in London, have calculated that this queen will be served with thirty people and have a stable of six horses. In truth she has a household of double that number as well as a good hundred of trouble-makers and admirers and followers who have settled in Tutbury and nearby, but visit us constantly, especially at mealtimes. We are not housing a guest with a retinue, we are housing a full royal court. Clearly, the Treasury will have to pay us more. Clearly, this Scots queen’s companions will have to be sent back to their homes. Clearly, I shall have to persuade my husband to make these unwanted announcements, since no-one else can tell the two queens that their arrangements are unworkable. My difficulty is that George will not like to do this, being a lord who has never had to deal with money, and never in his life drawn up an accounts sheet. I doubt I can even make him understand that we can barely afford this; not now, not for this month, certainly not till midsummer.

In the meantime I will have to send to my steward at Chatsworth and tell him to take some of the smaller pieces of silver down to London and sell them for cash. I cannot wait for the rents at quarter day; I have to buy things in Tutbury and pay extra servants, and for this I need more coin than I earn. I could laugh at my own sense of loss when I write to him to sell half a dozen silver plates. I have never used them but they are mine, hoarded away in my own treasure room. To sell them for their value as scrap is as painful to me as a personal loss.

At midday the hunting party comes home. If they have killed on the hunt then the meat goes straight to the kitchens and is an essential addition to the provisioning of this great household. We dine altogether in my lodgings, on this sunny side of the courtyard, and in the afternoon the queen often sits with me in my presence chamber for the light is better for sewing, and the room brighter, and her women can sit with mine and we can all talk.

We talk as women always do: inconsequentially but with enthusiasm. She is the greatest needlewoman I have ever met, she is the only woman I have ever known whose ability and love of sewing matches mine. She has wonderful pattern books that arrive, travel-stained but intact, from Edinburgh Castle and she falls on them like a child and shows me the pictures and explains them to me. She has patterns for Latin inscriptions and classical designs that all mean different things. They are beautiful and all carry hidden meanings, some of them secret codes, and she says that I can copy them out.

Her designer joins our household after a few days – he had been left behind at Bolton Castle. He sets to work for us both, drawing up designs, and I watch him as he sketches freehand on canvas the wonderful symbolic flowers and heraldic beasts as she commands him. She can say to him, ‘And put an eagle over it all,’ and his chalk arcs like a child scribbling in the sand and suddenly, there is an eagle! With a leaf in its beak!

It is a great thing, I think, to have an artist such as this man in your train. She takes him quite for granted, as if it were natural that a man of great talent, a truly fine artist, should do nothing but sketch designs for her to sew. I think of King Henry using Hans Holbein to draw designs for his masques which would be broken up the day after the dance was done, and employing great musicians to write songs for his chamber or the way that the poets spend their talents writing plays for Queen Elizabeth. Truly, these are the luxuries of kings. Of all of the riches that have surrounded this spoilt young woman from childhood, this employment of such a gifted man gives me the best sense of what her life has been like until now. Everything she has had around her has been supreme, the best of the very best; everyone who works for her, or follows in her train, is the most talented or charming or skilled. Even the design for her embroidery must be a work of art before she will touch it.

Together we work on a new cloth of estate for her. It will hang over her chair to proclaim her royalty. Her tapissier has already started stitching the dark red background. In gold curly script the letters will say: ‘En Ma Fin Est Ma Commencement’.

‘What does that mean?’ I ask.

She is seated on the best chair, between the window and the fire. I am on a lower chair, though this is my own room in my own house, and our ladies-in-waiting are on stools and benches near the windows for the light.

‘It was my mother’s motto,’ she says. ‘It means: “in my end is my beginning”. I have been thinking of it in these troubled days, and decided to take it as my own. When I lost my husband and was no longer Queen of France then I began my life as Queen of Scotland. When I fled from Scotland my new life in England begins. Soon, another phase of my life will start. I will return to my throne, perhaps I shall re-marry. In every end is a new beginning. I am like a queen of the sea, I am a queen of tides. I ebb, but I also flow. One day I shall cease to be queen on earth of any kingdom and be a queen in heaven over all kingdoms.’

I scowl at my women, whose heads bob up like rabbits at this unseemly and papistical assurance.

‘Should you like to do the gold lettering?’ she offers. ‘The silk is such a pleasure to work with.’

Despite myself, my hands go out to touch it. The silk is very fine, I have never worked with anything so beautiful, and I have loved needlework with a passion for all my life. ‘How is it so smooth?’

‘It is spun gold,’ she says. ‘Real gold thread. That is why it glitters so. Do you want to sew with it?’

‘If you wish,’ I say, as if I don’t much mind.

‘Good!’ she says, and she beams as if she is genuinely delighted that we will work together. ‘You will start at that end and I shall start at this and bit by bit we shall come closer and closer together.’

I smile in reply, it is impossible not to warm to her.

‘And at the end we shall meet in the middle, head to head and the greatest of friends,’ she predicts.

I draw up my chair and the fine fabric loops from her lap to mine. ‘Now,’ she says quietly, when we are settled with our gold thread. ‘Do tell me all about my cousin the queen. Have you been much to her court?’

Indeed, I have. I don’t boast but I let her know that I have been a senior lady-in-waiting at the queen’s court, at her side from the earliest of days of her reign, her friend when she was nothing more than a princess, friends with her friends, loyal informant to her advisor.

‘Oh, so you must know all her secrets,’ she says. ‘Tell me all about her. And tell me about Robert Dudley. Was she really so desperately in love with him as they all said?’

I hesitate at that. But she leans forward to engage me. ‘Is he still so very handsome?’ she whispers. ‘She offered him to me, you know, in marriage, when I first came to Scotland. But I knew she would never part with him. She is lucky to have such a loyal lover. It is a rare man who can love a queen. He has devoted his life to her, has he not?’

‘Forever,’ I say. ‘From the moment she came to the throne and formed her court. He came to her then and he has never left. They have been hand in glove for so long that they finish each other’s sentences, and they have a hundred secret jokes, and sometimes you see her just glance towards him, and he knows exactly what she is thinking.’

‘Then why does she not marry him, since he is free?’ she asks. ‘She made him an earl so that she could propose him for me. If he was good enough for me he must be more than good enough to marry her.’

I shrug. ‘The scandal …’ I say very quietly. ‘After his wife’s death. The scandal has never gone away.’

‘Can she not defy the scandal? A queen of courage can live down a scandal.’

‘Not in England,’ I say, thinking: and probably not in Scotland either. ‘A queen’s reputation is her crown, if she loses one she loses the other. And Cecil is against him,’ I add.

She widens her eyes. ‘Cecil commands her in even this?’

‘He does not rule her,’ I say carefully. ‘But I have never known her go against his advice.’

‘She trusts him with everything?’

I nod. ‘He was her steward when she was a princess with few prospects. He managed her small fortune and he saw her through the years when she was under suspicion of treason by her half-sister Queen Mary. He kept her safe. He guided her away from the rebels whose plans would have destroyed her. He has always stood by her; she trusts him as a father.’

‘You like him,’ she guesses from the warmth in my voice.

‘He has been a true friend to me also,’ I say. ‘I have known him since I was a young woman living with the Grey family.’

‘Yet I hear he is ambitious for his own family? Building a great house, seeking alliances? Matching himself with the nobility?’

‘Why not?’ I ask. ‘Does not God Himself command us to use our talents? Does not our own success show that God has blessed us?’

She smiles and shakes her head. ‘My God sends trials to those He loves, not wealth; but I see that your God thinks like a merchant. But of Cecil – does the queen always do as he commands?’

‘She does as he advises,’ I temper. ‘Most of the time. Sometimes she hesitates so long that she can drive him quite wild with impatience, but generally his advice is so good and their strategy is so long-planned that they must agree.’

‘So he is the one who makes her policy? He decides?’ she presses.

I shake my head. ‘Who knows? They meet in private.’

‘This is a matter of some importance to me,’ she reminds me. ‘For I think he is no friend of mine. And he was an inveterate enemy to my mother.’

‘She usually follows his advice,’ I repeat. ‘But she insists that she is queen in her own country.’

‘How can she?’ she asks simply. ‘I don’t know how she dares to try to rule without a husband. A man must know best. He is in the very shape of God, he has a superior intelligence. All else aside, he will be better educated, he must be better taught than any woman. His spirits will be more courageous, his determination more constant. How can she dream of ruling without a husband at her side?’

I shrug. I cannot justify Elizabeth’s independence. Anyway, everyone in the country would agree with her. It is God’s will that women are subject to men, and Elizabeth herself never argues against it. She just does not apply it to herself. ‘She calls herself a prince,’ I say. ‘As if being royal exceeds being a woman. She is divinely blessed, she is commanded by God to rule. Cecil acknowledges her primacy. Whether she likes it or not, she is set above everyone – even men – by God Himself. What else can she do?’

‘She could rule under a man’s instruction,’ she says simply. ‘She should have found a prince or a king or even a nobleman who could be trusted with the good of the country and married him, and made him King of England.’

‘There was no-one …’ I begin defensively.

She makes a little gesture with her hand. ‘There were dozens,’ she says. ‘There still are. She has just got rid of the Hapsburg courtier, has she not? In France we heard all about them. We even sent our own candidates. Everyone believed that she would find a man that she could trust with the throne and then England would be safe. He would rule and make treaties with other brother kings. Treaties that could be based on the word of an honourable man, not on the changeable views of a woman; and then she could have conceived sons to come after him. What could be more natural and right? Why would any woman not do that?’

I hesitate, I cannot disagree. It is what we all thought would happen. It is what Queen Mary Tudor, Elizabeth’s half-sister, tried to do, obedient to her wisest advisors. It is what this Scots queen did. It is what parliament went down on their knees to beg Elizabeth to do. It is what everyone hopes will happen even now, praying that it is not too late for Elizabeth to have a baby boy. How should a woman rule on her own? How did Elizabeth dare such a thing? And if she does, if she continues on this unnatural course: how shall she secure her succession? Very soon it will be too late. She will be too old to have a child. And however great the achievement of a reign, what is the use of a barren throne? What use is a legacy if there is no-one to inherit? What will become of us if she leaves the kingdom in turmoil? What becomes of us Protestant subjects under a Papist heir? What of the value of my property then?

‘You are a much-married woman, are you not?’ The queen peeps at me.

I laugh. ‘The earl is my fourth husband, God bless and keep him,’ I say. ‘I have been so unlucky to be widowed three times. Three good men I have loved and lost, and mourned each one.’

‘So you, of all people, cannot believe that a woman is best left alone, living alone, with only her fortune, and neither husband nor children nor home?’

In truth, I cannot. I do not. ‘For me, there was no choice. I had no fortune. I had to marry for the good of my family and for my own future. My first husband died when we were both children and left me with a small dowry. My second husband was good to me and taught me how to run a household and left me his estate. My third husband even more so. He left me his houses and all his lands entirely to me, in my own name, so that I could be a fit wife to the earl, Shrewsbury, who has given me my title, and greater wealth than I could ever have dreamed of when I was nothing more than the daughter of a poor widow at Hardwick.’

‘And children?’ she prompts me.

‘I have borne eight,’ I say proudly. ‘And God has been good to me and I have six still living. My oldest daughter, Frances, has a babe in arms, they called her Bessie for me. I am a grandmother as well as a mother. And I expect to have more grandchildren.’

She nods. ‘Then you must think as I do, that a woman who makes herself a barren spinster is flying in the face of God and her own nature, and cannot prosper.’

I do think this; but I am damned if I would say it to her. ‘I think the Queen of England must do as she prefers,’ I declare boldly. ‘And not all husbands are good husbands.’

I am speaking at random, but I score such a hit at her that she falls silent and then to my horror I see that she has looked away from her sewing and there are tears in her eyes.

‘I did not mean to offend you,’ she says quietly. ‘I know full well that not all husbands are good husbands. Of all the women in the world I would know that.’

‘Your Grace, forgive me!’ I cry out, horrified by her tears. ‘I did not mean to distress you! I was not thinking of you! I did not mean to refer to you or your husbands. I know nothing of your circumstances.’

‘You must be unique then, for every ale house in England and Scotland seems to know everything about my circumstances,’ she snaps, brushing the back of her hand across her eyes. Her lashes are wet. ‘You will have heard terrible things about me,’ she says steadily. ‘You will have heard that I was an adulteress against my husband with the Earl of Bothwell, that I urged him to murder my poor husband, Lord Darnley. But these are lies. I am utterly innocent, I beg you to believe me. You can watch me and observe me. Ask yourself if you think I am a woman that would dishonour herself for lust?’ She turns her tear-stained beautiful face to me. ‘Do I look like such a monster? Am I such a fool as to throw honour, reputation and my throne away for the pleasure of a moment? For a sin?’

‘Your life has been much troubled,’ I say weakly.

‘I was married as a child to the Prince of France,’ she tells me. ‘It was the only way to keep me safe from the ambitions of King Henry of England, he would have kidnapped me, and enslaved my country. I was brought up as a French princess, you cannot imagine anything more beautiful than the French court – the houses and the gowns and the wealth that was all around me. It was like a fairytale. When my husband died it all ended for me in a moment, and then they came to me with the news that my mother had died too; and I knew then that I would have to go home to Scotland and claim my throne. No folly in that, I think. No-one can reproach me for that.’

I shake my head. My women are frozen with curiosity, all their needles suspended and their mouths open to hear this history.

‘Scotland is not a country that can be ruled by a woman alone,’ she says, her voice low but emphatic. ‘Anyone who knows it knows that to be true. It is riven with faction and rivalry and petty alliances that last for the length of a murder and then end. It is barely a kingdom, it is a scatter of tribes. I was under threat of kidnap or abduction from the first moment that I landed. One of the worst of the noblemen thought to kidnap me and marry me to his son. He would have shamed me into marriage. I had to arrest him and execute him to prove my honour. Nothing less would satisfy the court. I had to watch his beheading to prove my innocence. They are like wild men, they respect only power. Scotland has to have a merciless king, in command of an army, to hold it together.’

‘You cannot have thought that Darnley …’

She chokes on an irresistible giggle. ‘No! Not now! I should have known at once. But he had a claim to the English throne, he swore that Elizabeth would support him if we ever needed help. Our children would be undeniable heirs of England from both his side and mine; they would unify England and Scotland. And once I was married I would be safe from attack. I could not see otherwise how to protect my own honour. He had supporters at my court when he first arrived, though later, they turned against him and hated him. My own half-brother urged the marriage on me. And yes – I was foolishly mistaken in him. He was handsome and young and everyone liked him. He was charming and pretty-mannered. He treated me with such courtesy that for a moment it was like being back in France. I thought he would make a good king. I judged, like a girl, on appearances. He was such a fine-looking young man, he was a prince in his bearing. There was no-one else I would have considered. He was practically the only man I met who washed!’ She laughs and I laugh too. The women breathe an awed giggle.

‘I knew him. He was a charming young man when he wanted to be.’

She shrugs her shoulders, a gesture completely French. ‘Well, you know. You know how it is. You know from your own life. I fell in love with him, un coup de foudre, I was mad for him.’

Silently, I shake my head. I have been married four times and never yet been in love. For me, marriage has always been a carefully considered business contract, and I don’t know what coup de foudre even means, and I don’t like the sound of it.

‘Well, voilà

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