Ross—

Greetings to you and to the Northern lords and their army. Bid them hurry to me. Elizabeth has sent her dogs and they will take me from here if they can. Tell Norfolk I am in terrible danger.

M

TUTBURY CASTLE: BESS

OCTOBER, 1569

They can have her. They can take her and damn well have her. She has brought us nothing but trouble. Even if they take her now, the queen will never pay us what she owes. To Wingfield and back, with a court of sixty people, perhaps forty more coming in for their meals. Her horses, her pet birds, her carpets and furniture, her gowns, her new lute player, her tapissier; I have kept her household better than I have kept my own. Dinner every night with thirty-two courses served, her own cooks, her own kitchens, her own cellar. White wine, of the best vintage, just to wash her face. She has to have her own taster in case someone wants to poison her. God knows, I would do it myself. Two hundred pounds a week she costs us against an allowance of fifty-two, but even that is never paid. Now it will never be paid. We will be thousands of pounds the poorer when this is finished and they will take her away but not pay for her.

Well, they can have her, and I shall manage the debt. I shall write it at the bottom of the page as if it were the lost account of a dead debtor. Better that we are rid of her and us half-bankrupt, than she stays here and ruins me and mine. Better that I account of her as dead and there is no reckoning.

“Bess.” George is in the doorway of my accounting room; he is leaning against the door, his hand to his heart. He is white-faced and shaking.

“What is it?” I rise at once from the table, put down my pen, and take his hands. His fingers are icy. “What is it, my love? Tell me. Are you ill?” Three husbands I have lost to sudden death. This, my greatest husband, the earl, is white as a corpse. At once I forget I have ever thought badly of him, at once dread of losing him clutches me like a pain of my own. “Are you ill? Do you have a pain? My love, what is it? What’s the matter?”

“The queen has sent Hastings and Devereux to take her away,” he says. “Bess, I cannot let her go with them. I cannot send her. It is to send her to her death.”

“Hastings would not—” I start.