I can get no news except the court gossip that Mrs. Rother brings me. She tells me that my cousin Lady Margaret Douglas and her fragile husband, Matthew Stuart, are living quietly at their home, keeping their heads down as Elizabeth’s displeasure blows over them. Now that they are freed—who were guilty of so much—the people of London are even angrier about my imprisonment, and now people start to say that my sister Jane was with child in the Tower, just like me, and her baby was killed when she died. I hate the way they use her name, but I am touched that they remember her as a martyr and say she would have given them a boy and an heir for England. They say that I, too, am unjustly imprisoned. The very people who called for “Our Elizabeth” to be a savior for the reformed religion in England now swear that she has become as bad as the persecutors were before. They say that she is torturing the sister of their Protestant martyr. Her army has failed in France, and failed to defend the Protestants, and now her defeated troops are straggling home, wounded, unpaid, miserably mutinous, their ranks ravaged by a terrible outbreak of plague.

But the most extraordinary news comes not from Mrs. Rother, but from my little maid Lucy, who had it from the poor lieutenant’s cook, who had it from one of the royal cooks, direct from the royal dinner table. In an attempt to reverse the opinion of everyone, and make her a safe choice of heir, Elizabeth is going to order Robert Dudley to marry Mary Queen of Scots.

* * *

It drives me quite mad not to be able to tell this to Ned, imprisoned in the White Tower and unable to come to me. He would laugh and laugh with me over this insane proposal. Elizabeth must have lost her mind to think of proposing her shamed lover to another queen, especially one who is so grand and on her dignity. Mary Queen of Scots has been offered Don Carlos—the heir to Spain. Why would she consider one of Elizabeth’s subjects? And one so tainted by such scandal? But Elizabeth is so desperate to avoid my rightful claim to the throne that she has hatched this impossible plot so that I can be put aside in favor of a shamed favorite and a papist Frenchwoman, whose family has just defeated our English army.

Elizabeth goes further. She proposes that she and Mary shall somehow live together, that she and Dudley and Mary shall all live together in some great palace. They shall be two queens sharing a court, sharing an island, and presumably Robert will be shared, too. It is an extraordinary, scandalous, mad idea, and I imagine the Privy Council, William Cecil, and Robert Dudley himself tearing their hair out of their heads.