If only I had someone to help me decide what I should do! I write again to Ned under cover of the English ambassador at Paris, though I don’t even know if he is still at Paris. I tell him that the linnets are well and that Jo the pug is comically faithful to me, as if she knows I need a friend. She has started sleeping on my bed, and I cannot stir without her coming to sniff my face. I tell him that the queen and Robert Dudley are as man and wife in the first dizzy months of marriage. I tell him that Mrs. Leigh has run away and I have no one to advise me. I say that I don’t know for sure what condition I am in, but that I would be so much happier if he were here. I don’t want to sound pitiful, as if I am pleading for him to come home, but I really feel that I am alone with my worry and without a husband; and now I need him so much.

I get no reply.

I know that there are dozens of reasons why he should not reply, but of course I fear that he has forgotten me or fallen in love with one of the French papists. What if the beautiful Dowager Queen Mary has taken a fancy to him and will take him to Scotland as her king consort, and I will never see him in London again? I write again, and though I wait and wait, there is no answer.

“My boy and your friend Ned Hertford are going on to Italy,” William Cecil remarks to me, as if it is pleasant news. “Unless we summon them home. What do you think, Lady Katherine? Shall we tell them to come back and leave their amusements?”

I want to say: command him to come! Instead, I look at the bows on my shoes over the smooth line of my stomacher, and I feel my itchy belly squeezed tightly against the boning. “Oh, tell them to enjoy themselves!” I say generously. “We are all happy here, are we not?”