Then the news comes that the Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise, is dead and the power of the French in Scotland collapses without her to uphold it. Cecil is coming home to London. He has made a triumphant peace treaty; but now Robert Dudley swears that he has gained nothing for all his hard riding: Newcastle to Edinburgh and back again. Elizabeth now wants more than Cecil’s treaty: she demands thousands of pounds of compensation, the return of Calais, and Mary, the Queen of France, to be banned from using the royal crest on her dinner plates—everything from the most grave to the most trivial. She and Robert, like a queen and her husband, stand side by side before the whole court and greet William Cecil with a tirade of complaints.

The defeat of French rule in Scotland should have been hailed as a victory, but William Cecil, whose skill brought it about, is crushed by Elizabeth’s ingratitude to him, unable to hide his fury that she is taking advice from Robert Dudley. The court divides in rivalry between those who see Dudley as the unstoppable star—husband and king consort-to-be—and those that say William Cecil must be respected along with the old lords, and that Dudley is an upstart from treasonous stock.

Elizabeth, having lovingly declared me as dear to her as a daughter, promising me that she will be a mother to me, that she will legally adopt me, that she will name me as heir, forgets all about me in this new crisis: as the man who has been a father to her and the man who has been a husband to her will not speak to each other for fury. All the court is certain that Cecil will abandon her, that Dudley will ruin her. There are whispers of plots to assassinate him; she has opposition on every side. She dare not agree that a country may choose its own heir. If the Scots are allowed to reject their Queen Mary, why do the English have to accept Elizabeth? In her anxiety for her lover, for her future, for the very nature of queenship, she has no time for me, no time for any woman.

“But I like being forgotten,” Mary, my sister, remarks. “I suppose I am used to it, being so often below the eyeline. But it does mean that you can do what you want.”

“And what do you want to do, you funny little thing?” I ask indulgently, bending down so I can see her exquisite face. “Are you getting up to mischief like half the court? Are you in love, Mary?”