I shake my head and go to the window. This is no good. I am not a fanciful man, but I cannot shake off this dream. It was not a dream, it was a foreknowing. The details were so clear, my pain was so strong. This is not simply a dream, it is how it will be—I know it. For me; for her.

It is dawn. It is the very day of Howard’s death. After such a terrible night, the terrible day has come. Today we are going to behead the Duke of Norfolk and I must be a man today, and servant to a queen who can do no other but kill her own kin. God save me from such dreams. God save the Queen of Scots from such an end. God save my beloved, my darling, from such an end, and God spare me from being a witness to it.

HARDWICK HALL: BESS

FEBRUARY 8th, 1587

God save them both today, and all days.

I have no cause to love either of them and no cause to forgive them either, but I find I do forgive them, this day of her death and this day of his final heartbreak.

She was an enemy to my queen, to my country, to my faith, and to me, certainly to me. And he was a fool for her, he laid down his fortune for her, and in the end, as most of us think, he laid down his reputation and his authority for her as well. She ruined him, as she ruined so many others. And yet I find I can forgive them both. They were what they were born to be. She was a queen, the greatest queen that these days have known, and he saw that in her, knight errant that he was, and he loved her for it.

Well, today she paid for everything. The day that he dreaded, that she swore could never come, turned out to be a cold wintry morning when she came down the stairs at Fotheringhay to find a stage built in the great hall and the great men of England, my husband among them, to witness her death.

The final plot that could not be forgiven, that could not be overlooked, that she could not blame on others, was a plot to murder Queen Elizabeth and take her throne. The Scots queen, fatally, signed her name to it. Anthony Babington, now a young man, who had been little Babington, my darling page boy, was the chief deviser of this treasonous scheme and he paid for it with his life, poor young man. I wish to God I had never put him in her way, for she took his heart when he was just a child, and she was his death, as she was for so many others.