She replies with equal coldness that she is unwell, that she requires her freedom, that she demands Elizabeth honor the agreement to send her home to Scotland, and that she has no letters to send. They part as formally as enemies forced to dance together and joined for a moment by the movement of the dance and then released again.

I should be rejoicing that their friendship has ended so abruptly and so badly, I should be laughing in my sleeve that the faithless queen should have been faithless to him. But it is hard to take pleasure in this prison. My husband the earl has aged years in these last few days; his face is grooved with sorrow and he hardly speaks. She is lonely, now that she has lost his love, and once again she comes to sit with me in the afternoons. She comes quietly, like a maidservant in disgrace, and I must say I am surprised that his disapproval should hit her so hard. Anyone would think that she had cared for him. We have working candles lit by five o’clock, and she says that she is dreading the darker nights and gray mornings. The midsummer tide of her good fortune has quite drained away; her luck has run dry. She knows that she will spend another winter in captivity. There is no chance now that they will send her back to Scotland. She has destroyed her own hopes and I am afraid that my house will be cursed with this sad ghost forever.

“Bess, what is happening in London?” she asks me. “You can tell me. I can hardly make any use of the information. I should think everyone knows more than me already.”

“The Duke of Norfolk is arrested, again charged with plotting with the Spanish, and returned to the Tower of London,” I say to her.

She goes white. Aha, I think meanly, so for once you are not ahead of us all. Her spies and informants must be lying low. She did not know of this.

“Bess, no! Is this true?”

“He is accused of being part of a plot to release you,” I say. “You would know more of this than I.”

“I swear—”

“Don’t,” I say coldly. “Save your breath.”

She falls silent. “Ah Bess, if you were in my shoes you would have done the same thing. He and I—”

“Did you really persuade yourself that you loved him?”

“I thought he would save me.”

“Well, you have led him to his death,” I say. “And that’s a thing I wouldn’t have done. Not even in your shoes.”

“You don’t know what it is to be queen,” she says simply. “I am a queen. I am not like other women. I have to be free.”

“You have condemned yourself to a lifetime of imprisonment,” I predict. “And him to death. I would not have done that in your shoes, queen or not.”