My cheeks blaze with shame that they should speak of Ned and me as if we were an ordinary couple, a pair of fools holding hands at the back of the court. They cannot know, they cannot understand, that we are deeply in love and, in any case, married.

“If he promised you marriage and left you, we should tell the queen,” Lady Clinton whispers. “Everyone saw that you were inseparable, and then he suddenly goes away. I will speak out for you.”

I am horrified that they should think that I should have been a loose woman. I am furious that they think that I should be such a fool as to be abandoned by a faithless lover. I am heir to the throne of England! I am sister to Jane Grey! Is it likely that I would lower myself to lie with a man not my husband and have to rely on my aunts to bring him home to me? But I cannot tell them that we are married and that he went away with my permission. And I cannot bring myself to confide in either of the two old harpies (who are at least thirty) that I am a married woman with child. I choke back my rage and I just smile prettily, and say that I am missing Janey very badly indeed. They take the tears of rage for grief and they both say that she was a lovely girl and it is a terrible loss, and so we none of us say anything more about Ned.

* * *

It seems that everyone is in full summer happiness but me. Everyone is courting but me. Elizabeth and Robert Dudley are open lovers: they go everywhere together, sometimes they even hold hands where everyone can see. She treats him like a husband and an equal, and everyone knows that if they want an allowance, a pension, or forgiveness for some crime, then a word from Robert Dudley is as good as the word of the queen since the one follows the other as if she had no choice in the matter, and no tongue of her own for anything but for licking his amorous lips.

He is lordly with his favor. She has given him huge sums of money, and licenses to tax profitable trades. She has stopped short of giving him a dukedom, but she pats his cheek and swears his family will rise again. Nobody now remarks that his wife died in the most suspicious of circumstances less than a year ago and that everyone blamed him. Nobody remembers that his father was executed for treason and his father before him. I remember it—but then it was my sister that Robert Dudley’s father forced onto the throne and so on to the scaffold. Everyone else at court chooses to behave as if Dudley comes from the greatest of families and has always been trusted and beloved.