I seal it and put it ready for a chance to smuggle it out, and then Agnes comes to prepare me for bed. My nightgown has been badly pressed and I send it away and choose another, then we pray together, then I dismiss her. All the time my thoughts are like a weasel in a cage, twisting this way and that, going round and round. I think of Bothwell, another animal in a cage. I think of him walking the length of his room, turning, and walking back again. I think of him looking out his barred window at the moonlight on the dark water of Malmö Sound, watching the sky for storms, scratching another mark on the wall to show another night in captivity. This is the eight hundredth and eighty-seventh night we have been apart, more than two and a half years. He will know that tonight, as well as I do. He will need no scratch on the wall to know how long he has been parted from me. He will be a wolf caged, he will be an eagle pinioned. But he will be himself, they will not break him. The wolf is still there, still a wolf despite the cage. The eagle is ready to soar, unchanged. Before I sleep, I write to him, who is sleepless, thinking of me.

Bothwell,

My star is in eclipse, my friends arrested or exiled, my spies in hiding, my ambassador afraid. But I don’t despair. I don’t surrender. I wait for you and I know you will come.

Don’t expect a reward. Don’t expect anything of me; we know what we are to each other, and it remains our secret.

I wait for you, and I know you will come.

Marie

TUTBURY CASTLE: GEORGE

JANUARY, 1570

The wintry days drag by. Hastings is still here, spending his time riding out to supervise the hangings of men named as rebels and given to the gallows as a pagan sacrifice to some ruthless god. I can hardly bear to leave the grounds of the castle; I cannot meet the accusing eyes of the widows in Tutbury. Inside, of course, there is nothing for me to do.

Bess keeps busy with the reports from her stewards and her endless books of accounts. She is anxious to get back to Chatsworth and summon Henry and her other children. But we cannot leave until Hastings takes the Scots queen, and we all wait upon our orders.

When they come, they are not what we expected. I go to find Bess in the little room she has commandeered for her records, with the letter from Cecil in my hand.

“I am ordered to court,” I say quietly.

She looks up at once from her desk, a ledger still open before her, ink drying on the quill pen, the color draining from her face until she is as white as the page before her. “Are you to be charged?”