I dash into my room and cram on my hood and then rush to the queen’s rooms to find her presence chamber shaded, with the shutters closed and everyone exchanging the news in hushed voices. Inside the private rooms the favored courtiers whisper low-voiced remarks. Many people will miss Kat Ashley; but everyone knows that this leaves a vacancy among Elizabeth’s ladies that an ambitious woman might fill, and a gap among her advisors that someone will seize.

I go to the bedchamber door. Aunt Bess, looking weary, comes out as I wait outside. “Will you take over from me for an hour?” she says. “She wants two of us in there all the time to sit with her and grieve.”

I nod and go in.

The room is shuttered and the fire is lit, it is dark and stuffy. Elizabeth is lying in bed, sheets drawn up to her chin, fully dressed, only her shoes slipped from her feet. Her ruff is crumpled around her neck, her eyes are smudged with paint, the ceruse is smeared on her pillow, on her askew red wig. But in her grief she looks almost like a child. Her suffering is as naked as any orphan in the streets. Elizabeth is always alone, though she fills her court with flatterers and time servers; and now, with the death of the woman who has been at her side since childhood, she realizes it all over again. Kat Ashley came to her when she had lost her identity. She had been a beloved princess, the daughter of an adored wife, then she was put away, forgotten, her title and her name taken from her. When Kat Ashley first came to the little girl, she found a child all but destroyed. She rebuilt her pride, she taught her a love of scholarship and of faith. She taught her to survive and be cunning, to trust no one. Kat was the only woman in the world who loved Elizabeth then, and now she has gone. Elizabeth turns her face into the pillow to muffle her shaking sobs, and I think—yes—now she is alone indeed, now perhaps she will understand what it is to love someone truly and be taken from them. Now perhaps she will have pity on Katherine, an orphan, parted from her husband and son.

* * *

William Cecil himself comes to the queen’s rooms, waits for me to come out to the privy chamber, and asks me to take a message in to the queen in her bed.

I hesitate. “She is seeing no one,” I say. “And Blanche Parry is to be the first lady of the bedchamber.”

He bends down so he can speak quietly in my ear. “It would be well that she heard this first from you,” he says, “since I cannot enter.”