“Forgive the interruption to your studies,” he says in a low voice. “But you wanted to know as soon as the Queen of Scots gave permission for Lady Margaret Douglas’s husband to enter Scotland.”

The boy my pretty kinsman Henry Stuart, yawning in a corner, catches the whisper of his mother’s name and looks up, but Elizabeth and Cecil are head-to-head.

“Queen Mary has never agreed?” she exclaims, hiding her beam behind a painted fan.

Cecil bows. “She has.”

She takes his sleeve and pulls him closer. Only Thomasina and I can hear their whispered conference. “But I only asked because I was certain she would refuse him admission to his Scots lands,” she whispers. “I only asked in order to distract and trouble Mary while she was negotiating with Don Carlos of Spain.”

“You have won more than you intended, then,” Cecil says smoothly. “You have outwitted her. For she has given permission to both the Earl of Lennox and his son to enter Scotland, and as papists they are certain to divide her from her Protestant advisors. Shall they go, or would it be safer to keep the youth here?”

Elizabeth beckons to Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a fair-headed boy as beautiful as a girl. He is a cousin of mine, since he is the son of Lady Margaret Douglas, but I can’t say we share much family feeling. I have never liked his mother, who revels in Elizabeth’s unfairness—she goes free while my sister is imprisoned; her stock rises while my sister’s falls. I swear that she thinks of herself as heir to the throne while everyone knows that it should be Katherine.

Henry Stuart himself came back from France to serve like a little bird in the cage of court: he warbles away to please the queen but the cage door never opens. His mother would put him anywhere that he might be seen: she thinks he is irresistible. It is an open secret that she hoped he would marry Mary Queen of Scots, but the queen managed to resist his rosy-lipped promises in the first days of her widowhood. Now he bows low to Elizabeth, and he nods to me; but we neither of us waste much time on the other. He is a vain young man with little interest in any woman of any size. What he knows to perfection is how to please older indulgent women who enjoy the company of a pretty boy, like his mother or the queen. All he likes for himself is to get drunk and range around the town looking for trouble with other pretty boys. Either way, I do not attract his attention, and he does not waste any on me.