“He cannot want her restored to power,” I say quietly. “He has worked for years to put Scotland under English command. It has been the policy of his life.”

“He cannot prevent it,” he says. “He has no authority. And it will be something then, my Bess, for us to be the dearest friends of the Queen of Scotland, don’t you think?”

I wait for the two girls to finish turning down the bed, curtsy, and leave the room. “And of course, she is heir to England,” I say quietly. “If Elizabeth returns her to Scotland, she is acknowledging her as queen and her cousin, and so it is to acknowledge her as the heir. So she will be our queen here, one day, I suppose. If Elizabeth has no child.”

“God save the Queen,” George says at once. “Queen Elizabeth, I mean. She is not old; she is healthy and not yet forty. She could yet marry and have a son.”

I shrug. “The Queen of Scots is a fertile woman of twenty-six. She is likely to outlive her cousin.”

“Hush,” he says.

Even in the privacy of our bedroom, between two loyal English subjects, it is treason to discuss the death of the queen. Actually, it is treason to even say the words “death” and “queen” in the same sentence. We have become a country where words have to be watched for betrayal. We have become a country where you can hang for grammar.

“Do you think the Scots queen is truly innocent of the murder of Lord Darnley?” I ask him. “You saw the evidence; are you sure she was not guilty?”

He frowns. “The inquiry closed without a decision,” he says. “And these things are not a matter for women’s gossip.”

I bite my tongue on an irritable reply. “It is not for gossip that I ask you,” I say respectfully. “It is for the safety and honor of your house.” I pause. He is listening now. “If she is the woman that they say—a woman who would murder her husband in cold blood and then marry the man who did the deed for her own power and safety—then there is no reason to think that she would not turn against us, if it was in her interest to do so. I don’t want my cellars packed with gunpowder one dark night.”

He looks aghast. “She is a guest of the Queen of England; she will be restored to her own throne. How can you think that she would attack us?”

“Because if she is as bad as everyone says, then she is a woman who will stop at nothing to gain her way.”