It is a bright cold Christmas at Grimsthorpe and my stepgrandmother is with the court so her household and I celebrate the season quietly in her absence. I am allowed to walk in the gardens, down to the stables and all around the courtyard of the beautiful castle, but when the snow falls and the drifts lie thick in the lanes, I cannot go farther. I don’t mind being imprisoned by snowdrifts, I know that a thaw will come.

My stepgrandmother sends me one letter with a Christmas gift of a gold cup and tells me the news. She writes carefully, so that no spy can claim that she is conspiring with me.

I have happy news of Ned Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, she writes, avoiding reiterating any claim that he is my brother-in-law. He has been released from imprisonment and is able to live freely at his home in Wiltshire, Wulf Hall. His sons, Teddy and Thomas, remain with their grandmother at Hanworth, but they can write to their father, and they may write and receive letters from you. I know this will give you great joy.

I pause in my reading and think of my little nephews, Katherine’s sons, and of their father still parted from them, but able at least to write to each other. Truly, Elizabeth has become a monstrously powerful queen. We are all placed only where she will allow us to be.

My stepgrandmother makes it clear that the inquiry that was to examine the treason of Mary Queen of Scots’ wicked half brother has been turned around completely. Lord Moray has supplied the inquiry with a casket of letters that are said to prove that the queen was her husband’s murderer, and Bothwell’s adulterous lover. It is not the treasonous half brother but the queen herself who is on trial—as Elizabeth swore she would never be.

The letters do not all appear to be in her true handwriting, my stepgrandmother tactfully explains. So some people doubt they are hers.

I am very sure of this. I imagine that William Cecil’s spies are cutting and copying letters like good children bent over their schoolbooks in a frenzy of forgery. But in any case, Elizabeth lacks the courage to come to a definite conclusion and we enter the new year with the Scots queen and me in confinement in our separate prisons, me at Grimsthorpe, she at Bolton Castle, dressed in her royal finery, which she insisted was sent on from Lochleven, both of us hoping for our freedom with the spring.

She does more than hope: she writes to Philip II of Spain, claiming that she is being held, without cause, by Elizabeth. This may gain her freedom, but will certainly win her the absolute enmity of William Cecil and all Protestants. Unlike her, I have no one to write to. My only royal kinswoman is my only enemy: Elizabeth.

GRIMSTHORPE CASTLE, LINCOLNSHIRE,

SPRING 1569