Bess is drained by worry about money and by fear of the future and by long bitter resentment of me. We are a remorseful household in this autumn season. I have to hope that the Scots will come to me once more and ask me to return; I have to believe that a fresh champion will write to me with a plan to release me; I have to believe that Philip of Spain will not be discouraged by this disastrous end to the plan that we swore could not fail. I cannot find in myself the courage to write once more, to start again, to stitch again the tapestry of conspiracy.

I think of Shrewsbury saying that I have dishonored my word as a queen and I wonder if anyone will ever trust me in the future or think it safe to rely on my judgment. I think I am truly defeated this time. My greatest champion and only friend Bothwell is still imprisoned in Denmark without hope of release, and he writes to me that he will go mad in confinement. My codes are all broken, my friends are imprisoned, the ambassador has left my service, my betrothed is facing a charge of treason, and the man who loved me, without even knowing it, will no longer meet my eyes.

SHEFFIELD CASTLE: GEORGE

DECEMBER, 1571

I thought I was in pain before. I thought that I had lost the love and duty of my wife, who had decided that I was a fool. I pledged myself, in silence, always in silence, to a woman so far above me as to be more than a queen: an angel. But now I find there is a new hell, below the one I knew. Now I find that the woman to whom I had given my secret loyalty is a traitor, a betrayer of herself, forsworn, a liar, a person of dishonor.

I could laugh to think that I used to look down on my Bess for coming from a farmhouse, for having an accent which cracks into Derbyshire, for claiming to be Protestant while knowing no theology, for insisting on the Bible in English while being unable to read Latin, for decorating her walls and furnishing her rooms with the spoils of a destroyed church. For being, at worst, little more than the widow of a thief, the daughter of a farmer. I could laugh at myself now for the sin of false pride, but it would be a sound like a death rattle in the throat.