“Is it how you said, or did you think that the plot might go ahead? Did you think that the queen might be tempted to consent to the escape, and you would have sent her out with these men into certain danger and perhaps death? Though you knew she has only to wait here to be restored to her throne and to happiness? Bess, did you think to entrap her and destroy her in these last days while she is in your power?”

She looks at me as if she does not love me at all, as if she never has done. “Now why would I seek her ruin?” she asks coldly. “Why would I seek her death? What harm has she ever done me? How has she ever robbed me?”

“Nothing. I swear, she has not harmed you; she has taken nothing from you.”

Bess gives a disbelieving laugh.

“I am faithful to you!” I exclaim.

Her eyes are like arrow slits in the stone wall of her face. “You and she, together, have ruined me,” she says bitterly. “She has stolen my reputation as a good wife; everyone knows that you prefer her to me. Everyone thinks the less of me for not keeping your love. I am shamed by your folly. And you have stolen my money to spend on her. The two of you will be my ruin. She has taken your heart from me and she has made me see you with new, less loving eyes. When she came to us, I was a happy, wealthy wife. Now I am a heartbroken pauper.”

“You shall not blame her! I cannot let the blame fall on her. She is innocent of everything you say. She shall not be falsely accused by you. You shall not lay it at her door. It is not her doing—”

“No,” she says. “It is yours. It is all yours.”

WINGFIELD MANOR: MARY

AUGUST, 1570

My darling Norfolk, for we are still betrothed to marry, copies to me the playscript of the charade he must act. He has to make a complete submission to his cousin the queen, beg her pardon, assure her that he was entrapped into a betrothal with me under duress and as a fault of his own vanity. The copy that he sends me of his submission, for my approval, is so weepingly guilty, such a bathetic confession of a man unmanned, that I write in the margin that I cannot believe even Elizabeth will swallow it. But, as so often, I misjudge her vanity. She so longs to hear that he never loved me, that he is hers, all hers, that they are all of them, all her men, all of them in love with her, all of them besotted with her poor old painted face, her bewigged head, her wrinkled body, she will believe almost anything—even this mummery.