I cannot wait to see what Elizabeth will do. I cannot wait for her slowly to act. I don’t know if my son is safely guarded, I don’t even know if he is well nursed. His false uncle, my half brother, has never loved him; what if he has him killed? I left him with trustworthy guardians in Stirling Castle, but what if they are besieged? I dare not sit here quietly and wait for Elizabeth to forge a treaty with my enemies that sends me on parole to France or orders me to hide in some convent. I have to get back to Scotland and enter the battle for my throne once more. I did not escape from Lochleven Castle to do nothing. I did not break free from one prison to wait quietly in another. I have to be free.

Nobody can know what this is like for me. Certainly not Elizabeth, who was practically raised in prison, under suspicion from the age of four. She is a woman trained to a cell. But I have been mistress of my own great rooms since I was a girl of eleven in France. My mother insisted I should have my own rooms, my own presence chamber, my own entourage; even as a child I had the ordering of my own household. Then as now, I cannot bear to be constrained; I must be free.

The ambassador bids me keep up my courage and wait for his news. But I cannot just wait. I cannot have patience. I am a young woman in the very prime of my health and beauty and fertility. They have left me to celebrate my twenty-sixth birthday in prison. What do they think they are doing to me? What do they think I will endure? I cannot be confined. I must be free. I am a queen, I was born to command. They will find that I am a dangerous and untamed prisoner. They will find that I will be free.

CHATSWORTH HOUSE: BESS

WINTER, 1568

Cecil’s clerk writes to tell me that Mary Queen of Scots is not to come to us at Chatsworth, where I could entertain her as she deserves: in a great house with a beautiful park and everything done as it should be. No, she is to come to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire: one of our poorest properties and half-derelict, and I have to turn my life upside down to make this ruin fit for a queen in the middle of winter.

“If your lord and husband could only have been prevailed on to see all the evidence against her, she could have been returned to Scotland in disgrace already,” Cecil writes, sweet as an unripe apple, in a postscript. “Then we would all have been able to rest easy this Christmastide.”