She laughs and slaps his hand away from another shell, but she is watching me. I cannot refuse to eat a gift from the queen’s platter, and I raise the shell to my mouth. The smell of seaweed and the sight of the gluey shell is going to be too much for me. I know I am never going to be able to eat it. I know I am going to disgrace myself before the court. I can taste the salt of hot bile in my mouth, I can feel my stomach churn and heave.

“Bon appétit!” the queen says to me, her sharp eyes on my green face.

“And to you, Your Majesty,” I say, and I open my mouth and pour it down and swallow it down. I close my mouth like a trap and I hold it.

The queen laughs so hard that she has to cling to Robert’s hands. “Your face!” she exclaims. “Have another!” she begs me. “Have more.”

* * *

I cannot speak to Robert Dudley privately till the evening after chapel. I manage to get beside him as we take our places in the great hall. “Did you tell her?” I demand.

“I told her; but she won’t speak of it till we are back in London,” he says. He glances forward to the top table, where the queen’s bronze head turns back to look for him. “Excuse me.”

“Is she not angry? Will she forgive me?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “She says that she won’t speak of it till London. What d’you think?”

* * *

I don’t know what to think, except that every day of the progress must bring me nearer to my confinement and the only person who has an opinion on the matter—Robert Dudley (of all the midwives a young woman might choose)—thinks that it must be September. Thank God we will be back in London by September and the queen will tell me then what I am to do. Nothing could be worse than this daily ordeal of travel, these miserable nights of amusement, and this terror of discovery every day.

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

SUMMER 1561

I am given permission to go ahead of the royal progress and return to London. Nobody says why, but I take it as a favor won for me by Robert Dudley, though he says nothing and the queen is as lighthearted as if he had not spoken. I go at once to the royal treasury rooms to find the tokens that Henry Herbert gave me as his pledge, but the box where I keep my precious papers—Ned’s betrothal to me, his beloved will, and the Herbert love letters—is not where I left it.

“You took them with you!” my maid says. “Because you said they were precious to you. So you took them on progress.”