I hand him the key and he opens it. Janey is bright-eyed, laughing. “I fell asleep!” she cries out. “No need to ask what you two were doing. You look as if you had died and gone to heaven.”

“I did,” Ned says quietly. He puts my cape around my shoulders and we go out through the garden gate and down the little garden to the watergate. The incoming tide laps at the steps that were dry when we came, and Ned shouts for a wherry boat, which turns and comes to us. Ned himself opens the doors for the watergate and then hands me into the boat.

“Till tomorrow,” he says passionately. “I will see you tomorrow and I won’t sleep tonight for thinking about you and today.”

“Tomorrow,” I say. “And then every tomorrow for the rest of our lives.”

* * *

I slip into the palace, hopping through the little wicket gate that is set into the enormous double doors, waving an apologetic hand to the queen’s enormously tall sergeant porter, Mr. Thomas Keyes, for not waiting for his ceremonial opening. “I’m late!” I call to him and I see his indulgent smile. Janey trails behind me, her hand to her chest as she catches her breath. I am desperate to change my dress and be in the queen’s rooms when we process to dinner, but then I notice that something is wrong, and I pause and look around me.

People are not hurrying to dress; nobody is making their way to the queen’s presence chamber. Instead, it seems as if everyone is chattering on every corner, at every window bay.

For one terrible moment I think they are speaking of me, that everyone knows. I exchange one aghast look with Janey, and then Mary breaks away from a knot of ladies and comes towards me.

“Where have you been?” she demands.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

“It’s the little King of France,” she says. “He’s been ill, terribly ill, and now he is dead.”

“No!” I say. This is so far from my guilty dash to get into the palace in time for dinner, so discordant with my pleasure-drenched day. I look at Mary and I realize that I simply have not understood what she is saying.

“What?”

She shakes my wrist. “Wake up! The King of France has died. So our cousin Mary Queen of France is now dowager queen. It’s not her throne anymore. She doesn’t have the French army behind her. She doesn’t have a little dauphin in the cradle and she’s not the most powerful woman in Christendom. Everything is changed again. She is not Queen of France; she is only Queen of Scotland.”

I glance at Janey, who is leaning back against a stone pillar, catching her breath.