“There were you, clinging to your throne, desperate for help. Someone was going to kidnap you and marry you by force. You were like a wild bird waiting for the net. There was I, longing for wealth and position and the chance to settle some old scores and rule Scotland. Would you not say we were born for each other?”

“Do you not love me? Did you never love me?”

He pulls me into his arms and his mouth comes down on mine. “Not at all. Not at all, you French whore, you precious vixen, mine own, all mine own.”

“No,” I say as his weight comes down on me. It is what I always say to him. It is the word which means desire to me, to us. It is the word which means yes: “No.”

WESTMINSTER HALL, LONDON: GEORGE

JANUARY 16th, 1572

London is like a city in mourning; I have never seen anything like it since the young Elizabeth was taken from the Tower to imprisonment in the country and we were so afraid that she would never come home safe again. Now her cousin makes another fearful journey, from the Tower to the Star Chamber at Westminster Hall. But this time it is ordered by us, the Protestants, the Englishmen, against another Protestant and an Englishman. How has this happened?

It is a cold morning, still dark—for God’s sake, why are people not still in their beds? Or going about their business? Why are they here, lining the streets, in a miserable silence, filling the lanes with foreboding? Cecil has ordered the queen’s guards and the mayor’s men to keep order, and behind their broad shoulders, the white faces of ordinary men and women peep out, hoping to see the queen’s cousin go by, hoping to call out to him their prayer that he will be saved.

They don’t get a chance to do even that. Of course Cecil trusts no one, not even the sorrowful good nature of the English crowd. He has ordered the guards to take Norfolk to Westminster Hall by royal barge along the river. The oars cut through the water to the drumbeat; there is no flag at the pole. Norfolk is traveling without his standard, without his herald, without his good name: a stranger to himself.

This must be his darkest time; he must be lonelier than any man in the world. His children are banned from seeing him; Cecil will not allow him any visitors. He has not even had a lawyer to advise him. He is as solitary as a man already on a scaffold. More so, for he does not even have a priest at his side.