I doubt that she even notices that I am absent. Of course it is exciting that suddenly all the serious Spanish have vanished and the sorrowful Queen Mary is dead, and everyone is young and reformist and flirtatious. Elizabeth, in the plumb center of it all, with her head turned by her sudden safety and importance, goes everywhere with Robert Dudley, my sister Jane’s brother-in-law, as if they were sweethearts, suddenly given the keys to their own palace. They are practically hand in hand; they must be dizzy with relief. It is a miraculous transition from the prison rooms of the Tower to the royal apartments overnight. They both must have thought that they would put their heads down on the block and now they rest their cheeks on the finest of linen embroidered with coronets. Her mother was beheaded, so was his father. Both of them have carved their names on the walls of a Tower cell and counted the days till their likely trial. It must be heaven to come through that darkened gateway and find yourself on the road to court. My sister, of course, took the opposite journey—from royal rooms to the scaffold—and it was Robert’s father who was the cause of her imprisonment. The plot for Elizabeth was the final straw and reason for Jane’s execution. I don’t forget this when I see their triumph: beggars’ triumph. I wonder that they are not ashamed.

But nobody thinks of it but me, and I try not to think of it at all. Elizabeth’s new court is crowded with people dashing back from Switzerland or Germany, or wherever they have been hiding from the Inquisition. The horses must be foundering on the roads all the way from Zurich. Our great friend Lady Bess Cavendish, widowed, married to another rich man, and a convinced Lutheran, turns up at court and is best of friends with us again, and a great adherent of Elizabeth. The Duchess of Suffolk, our young and beautiful stepgrandmother Catherine Brandon, reappears from exile with her commoner husband and two adorable little children. The whole world wants places and fees and favors, all of them suddenly the best friend of the loneliest girl in England. Elizabeth’s lady governess, Kat Ashley, is back at her side after a spell in the Fleet Prison for treason. No longer is Elizabeth the despised half-bred sister: she is the Protestant princess who has restored the reformed faith to England; she is the heroine of all reformers, as if my sister Jane had never been, as if I—a born reformer, born royal—did not exist.