“I swear to you, he loves you as much as ever,” Janey says mournfully. “He’s pining away, Katherine. But my mother has forbidden him to speak to you and warned him of the queen’s displeasure if she knew. I can’t bear it that you’re not together. I tell him that he has a worse illness than I do. And his cure is just here! You are the cure for his illness.”

“If only your mother would speak to Elizabeth!” I say.

Janey shakes her head. “She doesn’t dare. She told me that the Privy Council has told Elizabeth that she must find a safe husband for you at once. With English troops mustered to fight against the French in Scotland they are terrified that you will come out against her, or even leave the country. They are frightened that the Spanish will take you. They want you safely buried in marriage to a low-born Englishman who will keep you home and diminish your claim.”

“I wouldn’t go to Spain!” I say desperately. “Why would I? Where would I go? The only man in the world that I would marry is here. I have no interest in the archduke or anyone else! And why should I marry a low-born Englishman? Why should I be insulted?”

I am horrified by Janey’s gossip that they want to marry me to some nonentity and forget about me, but I feel even more afraid when I am told that the Scots lords have proposed that I should be married to my cousin the Earl of Arran, one of Elizabeth’s castoff flirts with a claim in Scotland, so that England can offer a rival Protestant queen to the rebellious Scots, and they can mass behind Arran and me, and defeat the French. They will marry me to Arran and make me Queen of Scots.

“What am I to do?” I say to Janey. “Are they all mad? Will they never stop trying to marry me to one dreadful man after another? Did she acknowledge me as princess just to sell me in an alliance? You must tell Ned that someone is going to kidnap me, if he does not save me.”