“My lord,” I say quietly. I am not as confident with him as I was with Count de Feria. He seems to think that we have an agreement, as if he has inherited me from the previous ambassador, an alliance rather than a liking.

“God bless him,” I say. “But I thought he was just injured jousting?” I am walking down the gravel path towards the allée of yew trees, with Janey leaning on my arm. Ned is going to meet us here, as if by accident.

“No! No! Dead! Dead!” says Ambassador de la Quadra, completely ignoring Janey and taking both my hands. “They have kept vigil beside his bed in vain. They have done everything they could, but nothing could save him. He is gone, God preserve and keep him. His son, little Francis, is king and your cousin Mary will be queen.” He lowers his voice. “Think what this means to you!”

I am thinking. I had no idea that the French king was so seriously injured. Men are hurt all the time in the joust, but what jouster kills his king? The French court will be in an uproar and he will be succeeded by his son, Francis II. This makes my cousin Mary Stuart queen twice over. She was already Queen of Scots, now she will be Queen of France. Her importance has doubled, trebled, exploded. Now she is queen of a huge country that is determined to grow greater. Now the French king himself will support the claim of his wife to the throne of England, with the French army behind him. Every papist in this country will prefer Catholic Queen Mary to Protestant Queen Elizabeth. Many more would say that she has been the true heir all along. She is the granddaughter of Margaret, the Scots queen who was Henry VIII’s sister, and her first husband the Scots king. Unlike Elizabeth, she is undeniably legitimate, royal on both sides, and more than anything else, she will have the great might of France behind her.

“Queen of France and Scotland,” I say thoughtfully. There she is, a girl no better born than I, not named in Henry VIII’s will like me; but she is queen of two countries before she is twenty-one.

“And so everything changes again,” the ambassador says to me quietly, taking my arm and leading me from Janey, who turns back for the palace, waving me away with my grand friend.

“I don’t see why,” I say. “And I should go back inside with Janey Seymour.”

“Because the new French queen’s Guise kinsmen will be eager for her to take her throne in Scotland and push back the reformed religion. Because they will encourage her to make her claim for the English throne. They won’t care about peace with England like the old French king; they want to rule Scotland and invade England from the south and the north.”