“Yes,” she says shortly. “Of course. I report to him. I have done so for years.” She turns away from me to the window and looks out.

“Did you not think that you were being disloyal to me?” I ask her. I am exhausted; I cannot even be angry with her. But I cannot help but be curious. That she should betray me and tell me of it without the least shame! That she should be so barefaced!

“No,” she says. “I did not think I was being disloyal, for I was not disloyal. I was serving you, though you don’t have the wit to know it. By reporting to Cecil I have kept us, and our wealth, safe. How is that disloyal? How does it compare to plotting with another woman and her friends against the peace of the Queen of England in your wife’s own house? How does it compare to favoring another woman’s fortune at the price of your own wife’s safety? How does it compare to dancing attendance on another woman every day of your life, and leaving your own wife at risk? Her own fortune half-squandered? Her lands in jeopardy?”

The bitterness in her voice stuns me. Bess is still looking out the window, her mouth full of poison, her face hard.

“Bess... wife... You cannot think I favor her above you...”

She does not even turn her head. “What shall we do with her?” she asks. She nods to the garden and I draw a little closer to the window and see the Scots queen, still in the garden, with a cloak around her shoulders. She is walking along the terrace to look out over the rich woods of the river valley. She shades her eyes with her hand from the low autumn sun. For the first time I wonder why she walks and looks to the north, like this, every day. Is she looking for the dust from a hard-riding army, with Norfolk at their head, come to rescue her and then take her down the road to London? Does she think to turn the country upside down once more in the grip of war, brother against brother, queen against queen? She stands in the golden afternoon light, her cloak rippling behind her.

There is something in the set of her head, like a beautiful figure in a tableau, that makes one long for an army in the fields below her, an army to rescue her and take her away. Even though she is my prisoner I long for her escape. She is too fine a beauty to wait on a tower without rescue. She is like a princess in a child’s fairy tale; you cannot see the picture that she makes and not want to set her free.

“She has to be free,” I say unguardedly to Bess. “When I see her like this, I know she has to be free.”