Elizabeth sends Mary some clothes; she has nothing but the riding dress she escaped in. But when they come to unpack the parcel it is little more than rags: two torn shifts, two pieces of black velvet, two pairs of shoes, nothing else.

“Why would she insult her cousin the Queen of Scots?” my stepgrandmother asks me. “Why would she treat her with such contempt?”

Both of us look at the tattered footstool and the two ragged tapestries that have been my household goods for so long, at the battered cup that Elizabeth sent from the servery for my use.

“To warn her,” I say slowly. “Like she warned Katherine, like she warns me. That we are poor without her favor, that we are prisoners without her favor. She may say that she cannot arrest another queen, but if Queen Mary is the guest of Francis Knollys and cannot leave, then what is she if not Elizabeth’s prisoner? Do you think Cousin Mary understands the message? That she is a prisoner like me?”

GRIMSTHORPE CASTLE, LINCOLNSHIRE,

SUMMER 1568

The Privy Council meets at Greenwich Palace and announces that Mary Queen of Scots will have to face a trial. She cannot be returned to Scotland by an English army without her innocence proved. She must be accused of killing her husband and the penalty for killing a husband—a crime of petty treason since it is a rebellion against the natural order as well as a murder—is death by burning. Amazingly, Elizabeth does not reprimand the council for disagreeing with her—which tells us all that they are her mouthpiece—saying what she does not dare. But Elizabeth does rule that Mary may not come to court to explain her actions, as one queen to another. She says that she and Mary cannot meet, that the Scots queen’s reputation is sullied by the rumors. The idea that a woman guilty of adultery cannot attend Elizabeth’s court would be funny if it were not so terrible when applied to our kinswoman Mary. How will she ever get a fair hearing if she is not allowed to speak? And if the Privy Council, that chorus inspired by Elizabeth and Cecil, are saying that she must be tried for murder without being able to speak in her own defense, then those two have surely decided that she is guilty and must die.

But Mary is too clever for them. She rejects the scraps of velvets and the old shoes, she calls it “a cold calling,” and Sir Francis, embarrassed with rags in his hands, says there has been some stupid mistake from the groom of the wardrobe. Mary says that she is a queen: she wears ermine, she is royal. Nobody should send her clothes for any rank less than royalty. And—equally—no one can try her, she is an ordained monarch: only God can judge her.