“How glad I am that we are married and don’t have to be like them,” I say, nodding ahead to where the queen and Robert Dudley are dawdling, her hand on his arm as he whispers in her ear. “I could not bear knowing that we would never be together.”

“I doubt that they are often parted. The whole country is gossiping about her, and now she has told the Earl of Arran that she will not marry him, and everyone knows that Dudley is the reason. I would never see you shamed, as she is. In Europe they say that she is a whore to her master of horse.”

I shake my head with wifely dismay. “But how terrible if she has to marry without love!” I say. “I would never have married anyone if I had been parted from you.”

“Nor I,” he whispers. Unseen by anyone he squeezes my hand. “Are you waiting on the queen this evening? May I come to your room before dinner?”

“Yes,” I whisper. “I dressed her yesterday. I don’t have to attend her today. I’ll leave my door unlocked.”

* * *

The season of Lent comes and is only slightly observed by Elizabeth’s court, which seems to have thrown out the season of fasting with all papist observances. Correctly, we eat no meat, but the kitchen makes a feast out of every sort of fish, and it turns out that fowls and even game are not considered to be meat by the Protestant princess. I don’t know what my sister Jane would have thought of this. I think Jane would have believed that the dietary laws should be strictly obeyed, and for sure she would have known every single one of them, including prohibitions of foods that no one has ever heard of. I so wish that I could ask her.

Even now, seven years after her death, I find that I want to ask her, or tell her something almost every day. Oddly, I miss her far more than I miss my mother. I can bear the death of my mother because it was expected, because we had time to say good-bye, because—to tell truth—she was not a loving or a kind woman. But Jane’s death was so sudden and unjust, and she was gone from me before I could ask her so many things, and even before I had become the woman I am today. And though she was righteous and fierce in her scholarship and her religion, she was a real sister to me, we were playmates and girls together. I think that I would have become a different sister to her than the spoiled little girl she knew. I think she would have come to like me if we could have grown up together. I lost a sister that day on Tower Green, but I lost our future, too.