Ambassadors, earls, lords sit around the great barge, drinking the best of wine and gossiping. I see Robert Dudley lower his dark head to Elizabeth and whisper in her ear and I see her turn her head and smile. They are so powerfully, so vividly in love that I suddenly forget that she is my most difficult cousin and I feel for her as another young woman in love. I can see that she yearns for him, from the way her head turns, to the way that she clings to the carved arms of her chair to stop herself from reaching for him. I think—I know this. I understand this. I have felt this too. And I look away before she can see the dangerous knowledge in my face.

“Indeed, it is a disgraceful spectacle,” someone says quietly in my ear, and I turn to Lord Pembroke, my onetime father-in-law, who stands beside me, observing me as I watch Elizabeth.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say, falling back on my reputation for innocence and ignorance, as if they were one and the same thing.

“Well, God bless you for that,” says the man who hustled me out of his house without a blessing, without a farewell.

From her perch on the chair, Mary gives me a smile and a nod, as if to advise me to do what I can with this unpromising material.

“We have missed you, in the House of Herbert,” he says pompously. “I know my son regrets that he was parted from his pretty little wife.”

I have nothing to say to this sudden barrage of lies. I widen my eyes and keep mumchance, in order to see where he is headed.

“And I know that you liked him,” he insinuates. “Childhood sweethearts, very pretty. Perhaps you could look on him with your favor once again. You are a great lady now, with perhaps a great future, but you will remember your youthful affections.”

There is so much here to deny that I put my hand over my stomacher where my belly presses hard, and I feel a little flutter, like a gurgle. I bow my head.

“So, here is my son Henry, as much in love as ever,” his father concludes and steps to one side to reveal, just as a masquer shows his dancing partner, Henry Herbert, healthier by far than the white-faced boy at our wedding day, handsome, smiling, and apparently deeply in love with me.

“I didn’t expect this,” I say to him, as his father beetles away to kneel before Elizabeth.

“Forgive me,” Henry says abruptly. “You know that I never wanted to leave you. You remember how quickly things happened, and that it was impossible to know what was right, and I was sick and I had to obey my father.”