She allowed me to return early to London and—when she could act easily and fast, secretly and unchallenged—she had me arrested and locked up in these three rooms, overlooking Tower Green, where the beheading of my sister plays over and over again in my mind’s eye whenever I look out of the window.

Of course, she’s not going to behead me. I am not so timorous that I imagine things are worse than they are. She is furious with me, but I have committed no crime. I will be held here, in moderate comfort, with my pets and my women, until the baby is born, until Ned comes home, and then we will both beg her pardon and be released, and we will have to live quietly at Hanworth until she forgets or forgives me. At the worst she will treat me as she does our cousin Margaret Douglas—with suspicion and dislike. Like her, I will raise my Tudor son, and laugh up my sleeve.

Like it or not, any boy of mine will be the next King of England; my rights will pass to him. This could make Elizabeth more kindly to me, as she can raise him as her heir, and then nobody can insist that she marry. But, since it is Elizabeth—a barren Tudor from a tyrannical line—it may make her angrier with me, as the prettier younger cousin who has done what she cannot. There is no way of knowing with Elizabeth. I cannot guess at her mind. I would never have imagined that she would imprison a woman about to give birth for doing nothing worse than marrying the young man she loves.

As she establishes her rule, the whole country and I learn that she is powerful and unscrupulous. I truly believe her to be a tyrant as wicked as her father, but I don’t fear that she will do worse to me than hold me in this shameful imprisonment until the birth of my son. She means me to be humiliated, and she has triumphed. Indeed, she has brought me very low.

“Oh, no, she plans far worse than this,” Mary my sister says, climbing up into one of my high dining chairs, and sitting back, her little feet stuck out in front of her.

“What could be worse?” I ask.