I must say, she does not inspire me either to love or to deep loyalty. I would never trust her with my oath—as I have trusted my own queen. This one is quicksilver: she is all fire and light. A queen who wants to hold her lands needs to be more of the earth. A queen who hopes to survive the hatred that all men naturally have for women who contradict God’s law and set themselves up as leaders has to be a queen like a rock, a thing of the earth. My own queen is rooted in her power. She is a Tudor with all their mortal appetites and earthly greed. My queen, Elizabeth, is a most solid being, as earthy as a man. But this is a queen who is all air and angels. She is a queen of fire and smoke.

On this journey (which feels as if it will last forever) she is greeted all along the road by people turning out to wave to her, to call their blessings down on her, and it makes a hard journey ten times longer. It amazes me that in midwinter they would leave their firesides to wait all day at the crossroads of the cold lanes for her small train to come by. Surely they must have heard the scandals about her? Every drinker in every alehouse in the kingdom has smacked his lips over the rumors which have somehow spilled out from the inquiries into her character, and yet I have to send orders ahead of us, wherever we go, that they are not to ring the church bells for this queen’s entry into their village, they are not to bring their babies for her blessing, they are not to bring their sick for her to touch against the King’s Evil, they are not to cut green branches and throw them down in the road before her as if she were riding in triumph: as blasphemous as if she were Jesus going into Jerusalem.

But nothing I say prevents them. These northern superstitious, feckless people are besotted with this woman, who is so far removed from them that they might as well love the moon. They honor her as if she were more than a queen, more than an ordinary woman whose reputation is already shadowed by gossip. They honor her as if they knew better than me—as if they knew a higher truth. As if they know her to be, indeed, the angel that she resembles.