I think: I have to tell someone who might be my friend and stand between me and the queen. I have to choose someone, from all these time-serving, two-faced, self-interested courtiers. I have to find one person that I can burden with my terrible secret, and hope that he will stand by me.

I could tell William Cecil—he is the best advisor to manage the queen, and he supports me as a Protestant princess and heir. He is opposed to any papist, so he will always prefer me to Mary Queen of Scots or Margaret Douglas. I am the only Protestant princess. He is promised to my cause. But I cannot tell him. I simply cannot. I could not look into those brown eyes, as trusting and sad as a spaniel, and tell him that I have been lying to him for months, that I married in secret and lay with my husband and now I have lost him and he has gone off—who knows where, with Cecil’s own son—leaving me to face the anger of the queen alone. It’s too much. I can’t say it. I cannot make myself speak the words. I am too shamed to confess to a man like William Cecil.

“Are you all right?” My sister Mary is at my elbow, looking up into my face. “You look green.”

“Queasy,” I say. “Don’t look at me. I don’t want anyone to look at me.”

“What is the matter with you these days?” she demands. “You’re as nervous as a foundling.”

I blink the sudden tears from my eyes.

“And you’re always crying!” she complains. “Has Ned left you?”

“Yes,” I say, and the word falls from my mouth like a stone as I realize the truth. “He said that he would write; and he hasn’t written. He said that he would go for weeks; and he has been gone months. He doesn’t reply to my letters; and I don’t even know where he is. So, really, I have to say that he has left me. He left me ages ago. And I don’t know what to do without him.”

“Henry Herbert?” she suggests.

“He’s furious with me for being in love with Ned. He knows all about that.”

She purses her pretty mouth. “Can’t you be happy without either of them?”

“We were promised to marry,” I say. Even now, I can’t even tell the truth to my sister. “I feel compromised.”

Mary laughs up at me. “For God’s sake! Our own sister died on the block for God’s Word. That’s what being compromised means. She died because she had given her word to God and would not retract it. Are you going to let your life be ruined for one little promise? A love promise? To a man? Just forget your promise! Break it!”

“This is nothing like Jane,” I say.