I am allowed to ride ahead of the guards these days. I am a queen with attendants once more, not a prisoner with jailers, and for once we ride in fresh air, untroubled by companions and not surrounded by a crowd in a storm of dust. At every village, as ever, the common people come out to see me, and sometimes they gather around the gibbet at the crossroads where the body of a man, dead for my cause, swings in chains. Shrewsbury would take me quickly past these gruesome puppets but I pull up my horse and let the people see me cross myself and bow my head to say a prayer for the soul of a good man who died for the true faith and the true queen.

At almost every village I see the quick, half-hidden movement as the good men and women cross themselves too and their lips whisper the words of a Hail Mary. These are my people; I am their queen. We have been defeated by Elizabeth and her traitorous army once, but we will not be defeated again. And we will come again. We will come under the flag of the Pope. We will be unbeatable. She can be very sure of that.

“We will go from Chatsworth on to Wingfield,” Shrewsbury says to me as we stop to dine on a riverbank, a simple meal of roast meats, breads, and cheeses. “Chatsworth is so much Bess’s house, she begrudges every penny she spends there if it is not on her eternal rebuilding and refashioning. I would rather have you under my own roof, and Wingfield Manor has been in my family for generations. And from Wingfield, if you can agree with the queen, I am to escort you to Edinburgh.”

“I will agree,” I say. “How can I refuse her? She has me as her prisoner; there is nothing worse that she can do against me. We are both entrapped. The only way I can be free, and that she can be free of me, is for us to agree. I have nothing with which to bargain against her. I am forced to agree.”

“Even to her holding your son?” he asks.

I turn to him. “I have been thinking of that, and there is a solution I would consider, if you would help me?”

“Anything,” he says at once. “You know I would do anything for you.”

I savor the words for a moment, then I go to the main question. “Would you serve as his guardian? If Prince James were to live with you, in your house, would you care for him, as you have done for me?”

He is astounded. “I?”