She is still a beautiful woman. Whether in a temper, whether scowling in a mood or white-faced in fear, she is still a beautiful woman, though thirty-five years of age. When she first came to the throne she was a young woman in her twenties and then she was a beauty, pale-skinned and red-haired with the color flushing in her cheeks and lips at the sight of Robert Dudley, at the sight of gifts, at the sight of the crowd outside her window. Now her color is steady, she has seen everything there is to see, nothing delights her very much anymore. She paints on her blushes in the morning and refreshes them at night. Her russet hair has faded with age. Her dark eyes, which have seen so much and learned to trust so little, have become hard. She is a woman who has known some passion but no kindness, and it shows in her face.

The queen waves her hand and her women rise obediently and scatter out of earshot. “I have a task for you and for Bess, if you will serve me,” she says.

“Anything, Your Grace.” My mind races. Can she want to come to stay with us this summer? Bess has been working on Chatsworth House ever since her former husband bought it, for this very purpose—to house the queen on her travels to the North. What an honor it will be, if she plans to come. What a triumph for me, and for Bess’s long-laid plan.

“They tell me that your inquiry against the Scots queen, my cousin, failed to find anything to her discredit. I followed Cecil’s advice in pursuing the evidence till half my court was turning over the midden for letters and hanging on the words of maids spying at bedroom doors. But there was nothing, I believe?” She pauses for my confirmation.

“Nothing but gossip, and some evidence that the Scots lords would not publicly show,” I say tactfully. “I refused to see any secret slanders as evidence.”

She nods. “You would not, eh? Why not? Do you think I want a dainty man in my service? Are you too nice to serve your queen? Do you think this is a pretty world we live in and you can tiptoe through dry-shod?”

I swallow on a dry mouth. Pray God she is in a mood for justice and not for conspiracy. Sometimes her fears drive her to the wildest of beliefs. “Your Grace, they would not submit the letters as evidence for full scrutiny; they would not show them to the Queen Mary’s advisors. I would not see them secretly. It did not seem to be... just.”

Her dark eyes are piercing. “There are those who say she does not deserve justice.”