“You know, don’t you?” I ask wearily. I don’t sit down on the stool at her feet again, I remain standing, and she rises from the seat and comes beside me. I can smell the perfume in her hair; she stands so close that if I stretched out my hand I could touch her waist. I could draw her to me. She tilts back her head and smiles at me, a knowing smile, one that would be exchanged between warm familiar friends, a lovers’ smile.

“I don’t know anything,” she says with her naughty, confiding gleam.

“I have just been telling him that this Ridolfi might have used your name without your leave,” I say. “He doesn’t believe me, and I find I don’t even believe myself. You know Ridolfi, don’t you? You authorized him, didn’t you? You sent him to the Pope, and to the duke in the Netherlands, and to Philip of Spain; you ordered him to plan an invasion? Even though you are sworn to a new agreement with Elizabeth? Even though you signed your name to her peace treaty? Even though you promised Morton that you would weave no plots and send no letters? Even though you promised me privately, between the two of us, at my request, that you would take care? Even though you know that they will take you away from me if I don’t guard you?”

“I cannot live like a dead woman,” she whispers, though we are alone and there is no sound in the garden but the haunting late afternoon song of the thrush. “I cannot give up on my own cause, on my own life. I cannot lie like a corpse in my coffin and hope that someone is kind enough to carry me to Scotland or to London. I have to be alive. I have to act.”

“But you promised,” I insist like a child. “How can I trust anything, if I hear you promise on your honor as a queen, if I see you sign your name and place your seal, and then I find that it means nothing? You mean none of it?”

“I am imprisoned,” she says. “Everything means nothing until I am free.”

I am so angry with her and I feel so betrayed that I turn my back on her and take two hasty steps away. It is an insult to a queen: men have been banished from court for far less than turning their back. I check when I realize what I have done, but I don’t turn to face her and kneel.