“We’ll go to the gallery,” I interrupt, and so I get a chance to lead the way with Bess and try to warn her again: “He is inquiring after a plot to free the queen. He says you are in it. With a man called Thomas Gerard.” Her little gasp tells me everything. “Wife,” I almost groan, “what have you done?”

She doesn’t answer me; she ignores me, though I am risking my own neck by whispering to her. She spins around to young Mr. Gracie, standing on the stair below her, and puts out her hand to him, with her frank, honest smile.

“My husband tells me that Cecil knows of the Gerard plot,” she says quickly. “Is this why you are here?”

I stifle my horror at this plain dealing. If only she would take advice from me; if only she would not act as she does, always so independently.

He takes her hand as if she were sealing a bargain with him, and nods, watching her intently. “Yes, it is about the Gerard plot.”

“You must think me very foolish,” she says. “I was trying to do the right thing.”

“Indeed?”

“I was going to tell my husband today; he knows nothing of this.”

A quick glance from Mr. Gracie’s brown eyes to my horror-struck face confirms this well enough, and then he is back to Bess.

“My servant, John Hall, came to tell me that someone had tried to bribe him to lead the Scots queen riding onto the moor, where she would be met by her friends and taken away.”

Cecil’s man nods again. It strikes me that all this is old news to him, he knows all about it already; what he is listening for is to hear Bess lie. This is not an inquiry; this is an entrapment.

“Tell the truth, wife,” I warn her. “Don’t try to protect your servants. This is important.”

She turns her pale face to me. “I know,” she says. “I will tell Mr. Gracie the whole truth, and he will tell my good friend Mr. Cecil that I am honest and loyal as I ever was.”

“What did you do, when your servant John Hall came to you?” Mr. Gracie asks her.

“I asked him who else was in the plot, and he named a Mr. Rolleston and Sir Thomas Gerard and said that there might be another, greater man behind it all.”

“And what did you do?”

Bess looks at him with her frank smile. “Now, I daresay that you will think me a scheming woman, but I thought that if I sent John Hall back to the men with word that the plot could go ahead, he could discover the names of the plotters and if there was a greater man behind them. And then I could tell Master Cecil the whole plot, and not a small worthless strand of it.”

“And has he reported back to you?”