It is a drawing of me as a mermaid, a bare-breasted whore, and beneath it is a filthy poem listing my husbands and remarking that they all die, as if my bed were a charnel house. It says that poor Francis of France was poisoned by me, Darnley was murdered by Bothwell, and I took him to my bed as a reward. It says Bothwell is kept as a lunatic in a barred cave facing the North Sea. It calls me his French whore.

Bess tosses it into the fireplace. “Filth,” she says simply. “Think nothing of it. Someone must have got drunk on Christmas ale and sung a little song and scribbled a picture. It is nothing.”

“It is directed at me.”

She shrugs. “News of the Ridolfi plot will spread throughout the kingdom and you will be blamed for it. You have lost the love that people had for you when they thought you were a princess tragically ill-treated by the Scots. Now they think you bring us nothing but trouble. Everyone fears and hates the Spanish. They will not quickly forgive you for inviting them in against us. Even the Catholics blame you for inciting the Pope against Elizabeth. They wanted to live in peace, we all want to live in peace, and you are spoiling it.”

“But this is not about the Spanish and all that,” I say. “It says nothing about Ridolfi or the Duke of Norfolk. It is all about Darnley, and Scotland, and Bothwell.”

“Men in an alehouse will repeat anything filthy. But it cannot matter to you what they say. They will say anything, and this is old scandal.”

I shake my head, as if to clear my thoughts, and I pick up my little dog and hug him for comfort. “But why this old scandal? Why now?”

“They gossip about what they hear,” she says steadily. “Isn’t it perennial news? An old scandal?”

“But why speak of it now?” I demand. “Why don’t they blame me for inciting the Pope or calling in the Spanish? Why this old story in preference to the new? Why now?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I hear no gossip here. And I don’t know why it would come up again now.”