I do believe her. Her husband, Richard Bertie, bends down and kisses my hand and tells me that good times will come. Everyone suffers in this troubled world, but God rewards those who are faithful to Him. He reminds me that my stepgrandmother was summoned home when her religion became the faith of England, and overnight she was no longer a damned heretic but one of the chosen.

“Besides,” my lady grandmother tells me, “Elizabeth cannot create a force for Mary Queen of Scots. She has given the Clan Hamilton a great bribe, but they will not raise an army for Mary. She has demanded that the countries of Europe starve Scotland out. But not even the French, Mary’s former family, will support a trade blockade on Scotland. Without Spanish support, without the French, Elizabeth can do nothing for her cousin: she cannot act on her own.”

“Or at any rate she dare not,” Richard Bertie supplements quietly.

My lady grandmother laughs and slaps her husband’s hand. “It is not in the interest of England to restore the papist queen to her throne,” she says. “The queen, our queen, will never work against the interest of her Protestant country. Wherever her heart yearns to be, she always has a steady head. You can be sure of that.”

“I can be sure of William Cecil,” Richard Bertie says. “His heart doesn’t yearn for a papist in trouble.”

“And in the meantime,” I ask, “what is happening to Mary, the former Queen of Scotland?”

My stepgrandmother shrugs her shoulders as if to say “Who cares?” “She is imprisoned,” she says. “She must miss the son that she handed over; she must grieve for the babies that she lost. She must know that she has been a fool. My God, she must regret with all her soul that she married that vicious boy and then allowed his murder, and then married his killer.”

“I don’t know that there is any evidence that she murdered Lord Darnley,” I put in.

My stepgrandmother raises her eyebrows. “Then who did?” she asks. “Whoever benefited from the death of that worthless young man if not his abused wife and her lover?”

I open my mouth to argue, but I fall silent. I don’t know the truth of the matter, I don’t know what my dangerous and beautiful cousin might or might not have done. But I know that she, like Katherine and me, will hate her prison, beating against the bars like a frightened bird. I know she will be like us, determined to be free. I know that she, like us, will do anything to be free. In that is our only power. In that we are a danger to ourselves.

* * *