“I see you do not trouble yourself to be on time,” she remarks. “I did not see you in chapel either.”

All of her ladies shrink back from the royal bad temper, making an avenue of gowns between me and the queen, and everyone looks towards me. I see Sir William Cecil’s tired face, irritable with impatience at the distraction. He is Elizabeth’s great advisor, and it tries his exhausted patience when she squabbles with her ladies when there is so much for her to do in the kingdom. I see Robert Dudley, who looks at me as if we are strangers. I see my aunt Bess St. Loe. She glares at me, as if she wishes I would behave better, and I see Mary’s little face half-hidden among the maids-in-waiting, and her grimace at my discomfort.

I think how faithless they all are. My sister was a queen, and I am five minutes late to Elizabeth’s presence chamber because I have been meeting with a man who loves me, a good man, who will defend me from the enemies of the kingdom, and they behave as if I am a naughty schoolchild and this bastard claimant can scold me.

I curtsey again, biting my tongue. “I am sorry, Your Majesty,” I say as sweetly as I can.

“Were you meeting the Spanish ambassador in a hidden place?” she asks.

William Cecil raises his eyebrows at her indiscretion. De la Quadra, the Spanish ambassador, at the back of the room, bows blandly, as if to say—not at all.

“Not at all,” I say steadily.

“The French ambassador?” she suggests. “For I hear on all sides that you are discontented at court, and I must say, I do not know how I might please you. Nor,” she says, savoring her spiteful joke, “why I should please you, given that it was your sister who took my throne.”

It is her speaking of Jane that makes me forget myself. I feel a flare of rage, as hot and as passionate as my earlier rush of desire. I will not have this red-headed usurper insulting my sister. “You need not strive to please me,” I spit. “And I am only a little late.”

She could leave it at that; she has bigger things to worry about than my pertness. But her plucked brows arch high in surprise at my reply. “You are quite right for once: I have no obligation to be good to you,” she says nastily. “For sure, you are no good lady to me. What do you bring to my service? You are late and rude, your mother is ill and always absent, and your sister half-size. I don’t have full measure of a lady-in-waiting from any of the three of you. Or should I say two and a half?”