“Their babies, or perhaps their babies’ babies,” he says. “She had them nesting and breeding and we had to give some away and keep some as she ordered. But I have a bonny cage of singing linnets for you, coming after me in the wagon.”

THE MINORIES, LONDON,

SPRING 1568

Bess St. Loe, our family friend and sometime ally, pulled off a triumph last year that makes me smile whenever I think of her. Aunt Bess buried her third husband and walked as a great heiress to the altar for the fourth time—but this time she surpassed herself—she netted George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and is now the richest woman in England second only to the queen, owning almost all of the Midlands of England.

It would take a sadder little woman than I not to laugh aloud at the tremendous progress that Aunt Bess has made. Once she was a friend and a hanger-on at Bradgate, now she is a countess. Aunt Bess, born a poor girl and widowed young, glad of my mother’s favor, is now a great woman by her extraordinary business sense, and by marriage. Of course, I think that her good luck might serve me. A landowner such as Aunt Bess with thousands of houses at her command and acres of farms and villages could very easily house me in one of them. She is trusted by the queen; she could guarantee that I would not run away or plot with the Spanish, nor anything else that the queen pretends to fear, in order to keep me in captivity. If Aunt Bess will say one word for me (though I don’t forget that she never said anything for my sister Katherine), then I might yet be a free tenant near Wingfield Manor, Tutbury Castle, or Chatsworth House, or any of the other half dozen houses that she owns. If she were to be my landlord, I would need no guardian, I would liberate my stepgrandmother from her duties and Elizabeth’s irritable disfavor, I would be far from London and quite forgotten, and I could be free.

I tell my stepgrandmother that I am thinking that Bess might speak for me to the queen and might offer to house me, and she encourages me to write to the new countess and ask her to use her influence with the queen—for she is still a lady-in-waiting, though now considerably higher up the ranks. I think that a little house, a very small house in a mean village, might be a source of great happiness to me. I might have Thomas Keyes’s children to live with me, even if I could never see him. And Mr. Nozzle would like a little orchard, I am sure.

GRIMSTHORPE CASTLE, LINCOLNSHIRE,

SUMMER 1568