He takes a turn around the room, pulls a linen shirt over his head and a pair of riding breeches over his nakedness. “You should have gone to the queen long before now.”

“Yes, but I can’t go now,” I protest. “I thought that you might let me live in one of your smaller houses, somewhere far away, and have my child.”

“Never,” he says. “The scandal that would break about your head would be beyond your imagining. Everyone would think that it was my child, or that you were the queen giving birth in secret to my bastard. You would bring down the throne. Do you think—” He breaks off with a curse. “No. You don’t think, do you?”

He is right. I had not thought of that. I am incapable of thinking.

“You could not have chosen a worse moment,” he says almost to himself. “The Queen of Scots returning to Edinburgh, the peace treaty not even signed by her...”

“It’s coming,” I say flatly. “Whether the Queen of Scots takes her throne or not. The baby is coming. I have to go somewhere.”

He runs his hand through his dark curly hair. “When?”

I look at him. “When what, Sir Robert?”

“When is your baby due? When will it be born?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know for sure. Soon, I think.”

“For God’s sake!” He forgets himself and raises his voice. “You must know when you were wedded and bedded. You must have a general idea.”

“We were married in December, at his house,” I say. I smile at the memory of Janey and me slipping and sliding in the mud as we walked along the foreshore to Ned’s house.

“Next month then,” Robert says.

“Will it be?”

“Something like that. It’s usually nine months or so.”

“Is it?”

“You don’t know? For the love of God! Have you not seen a midwife?”

I can’t confess that we were lying together before we were married. “How could I see a midwife?”

His irritation suddenly leaves him as he realizes how very alone I am. I have no mother to advise me, my sister is dead, and I have not found a friend to replace Janey. I am brought so low that I have had to come to him. “Yes, of course,” he says quietly. “Poor little wench.”

“I hoped you would help me,” I say humbly. “For my sister Jane’s sake. She married your brother. It was your father’s plan. Nothing has gone right for us since then.”

His gesture cuts me short. “Not another word about her,” he says. “And it doesn’t behoove you to cite her name. Not in your condition.”

“I am a married woman,” I say staunchly. “She would not have condemned me for marrying for love.”

“Then where’s your husband?”

I stammer. “You know that I don’t know.”

“Not heard from him at all?”