“She can be furious,” I point out. The court has grown wary of Tudor rage. Where Queen Mary would sink into despair, Elizabeth will scream and throw things. The only man who can soothe her then is Robert Dudley. The only man who can advise her is William Cecil. She shouts down everyone else.

Ned, my lover, my husband-to-be, shrugs his shoulders as if she does not frighten him. “She will be furious but it will blow over. We have seen her furious with Kat Ashley; we have seen her rage at Cecil until he left court. But he came back, and she did as he advised. It will be the same for us. She will rage, we will leave, she will forgive us and restore us to our places within a month. Besides, it is in her interest that we are married so that you are safe. Cecil will advise her of that. Dudley will tell her to smile on lovers.”

“I want to be safe.” I nestle a little closer. “I want to be safe with you. Oh, Ned, I have dreamed of this.”

“I have dreamed of you, too,” he whispers. “I have written a poem to you.”

“You have?”

He feels in the inside pocket of his jacket. “I carry it with me,” he says. “I wrote it when you were in your mourning black and I used to see you, with your hair so golden and your skin so creamy pale. You were like a portrait, like a marble statue wrapped in velvet, and I thought that I would never touch you again. I thought we were like Troilus and Criseyde, parted like them.”

“Read it!” I whisper. Really, this is as good as a Romance.

“She stood in black said Troilus he,

That with her look hath wounded me.

She stood in black say I also

That with her eye, hath bred my woe.”

I give a shuddering breath of delight. “May I have it?” Nobody has ever written a poem to me before; nobody ever wrote one for Jane for all that she was such a great scholar and a queen. People wrote sermons for Jane but this is a real thing, a poem, a love poem from a man. Better than that: a love poem from a poet, a famous poet. A sermon simply doesn’t compare. He presses it into my hand and I hold it to my heart.

GREENWICH PALACE,

SUMMER 1560

This is living, I think feverishly. This is what it is to be young and beautiful and alive, and not absorbed by some miserable creed that makes you learn to die and not delight in life. This is what I hoped when I came out of the Tower and left my sister behind, to be beheaded and buried in pieces in the chapel. This is how I believed my life should be and now it is: vivid and passionate and far more wonderful than I ever dreamed.