Teddy is thriving and wakes only once in the night to feed. I ask the lieutenant if we can go outside in the warm summer air, so that he can feel the sunshine on his skin, and he says that my lady-in-waiting can walk him in the garden or by the river every day.

“Nobody has told me that the innocent babe is under arrest,” he says, and I think I hear the note of resentment in his quiet voice and I think—this is what it is to be in the service of Elizabeth. You start hopefully on a course and then you find that she goes further than makes sense, further than you can bear.

I go to bed early, and I lie in the twilight as the room slowly darkens, and I wonder what will happen when Mary Queen of Scots replies to the message of Elizabeth’s masque. Can those two determined rivals really make peace together? Will they be—as Mary once offered—two queens in one isle? Will they really make a great meeting together, and become friends? Might Elizabeth finally have found the one person, an equal, that she can trust?

And if they do meet, make friends, fall in love with each other’s majesty, will I decline into such obscurity that Elizabeth releases Ned and me from our imprisonment? Is my greatest ambition now to be forgotten by everyone who said that I should one day be a queen?

There is a tap on the outer door, and the key turns noisily in the lock. I get up from my bed, throw my robe around my shoulders, and go to unbolt it. My maid sleeps with Teddy, and my lady-in-waiting comes in every day. There is no one to open my door from the inside through the night but me. This is no hardship—nobody ever comes at nighttime after the dinner has been served. This must be a guard with a message; I dare not hope it is a pardon.

“Who’s there?” I call a little nervously, but I cannot hear the reply as I slide back the bolts, and when I open the door, there is a guard and a taller man with his hood pulled so far forward that I cannot see his face.

I go to slam the door, but he puts out a quick hand. “D’you not know me?” he whispers. “Wife?”

It is Ned, it is Ned, it is Ned my husband, handsome and smiling. He gives a nod to the guard and pushes my door open. He sweeps me into his arms and kisses my face, my hair, my closed wet eyelids, my lips.

“Ned,” I gasp. I cannot catch my breath.

“My love. My wife.”

“You are free?”