“You must be unique then, for every alehouse in England and Scotland seems to know everything about my circumstances,” she snaps, brushing the back of her hand across her eyes. Her lashes are wet. “You will have heard terrible things about me,” she says steadily. “You will have heard that I was an adulteress against my husband with the Earl of Bothwell, that I urged him to murder my poor husband, Lord Darnley. But these are lies. I am utterly innocent, I beg you to believe me. You can watch me and observe me. Ask yourself if you think I am a woman that would dishonor herself for lust?” She turns her tear-stained beautiful face to me. “Do I look like such a monster? Am I such a fool as to throw honor, reputation, and my throne away for the pleasure of a moment? For a sin?”

“Your life has been much troubled,” I say weakly.

“I was married as a child to the Prince of France,” she tells me. “It was the only way to keep me safe from the ambitions of King Henry of England: he would have kidnapped me and enslaved my country. I was brought up as a French princess; you cannot imagine anything more beautiful than the French court—the houses and the gowns and the wealth that was all around me. It was like a fairy tale. When my husband died it all ended for me in a moment, and then they came to me with the news that my mother had died too, and I knew then that I would have to go home to Scotland and claim my throne. No folly in that, I think. No one can reproach me for that.”

I shake my head. My women are frozen with curiosity, all their needles suspended and their mouths open to hear this history.

“Scotland is not a country that can be ruled by a woman alone,” she says, her voice low but emphatic. “Anyone who knows it knows that to be true. It is riven with faction and rivalry and petty alliances that last for the length of a murder and then end. It is barely a kingdom; it is a scatter of tribes. I was under threat of kidnap or abduction from the first moment that I landed. One of the worst of the noblemen thought to kidnap me and marry me to his son. He would have shamed me into marriage. I had to arrest him and execute him to prove my honor. Nothing less would satisfy the court. I had to watch his beheading to prove my innocence. They are like wild men; they respect only power. Scotland has to have a merciless king, in command of an army, to hold it together.”

“You cannot have thought that Darnley...”