like the swoop of a swallow in flight in midsummer dusk. My second thought is that Queen Elizabeth will hate her like poison.
“This is a most kind welcome,” she says in French, then sees my frown as I can’t understand her, and she says in hesitant English, “You are kind, thank you.” She holds out her hands to the blaze and then she stands up. Quietly, her ladyinwaiting comes forward and unties the furs at her neck and slips off her wet cloak. She nods her thanks. “Lady Shrewsbury, may I present my ladiesinwaiting? This is Lady Mary Seton, and here is Lady Agnes Livingstone,” she says, and the women and I curtsy to each other and I nod to one of my servants to take the wet cloak away.
“May I offer you some refreshment?” I say. I left Derbyshire when I was a girl and I have studied my speech ever since, but even so my voice seems too loud, uncouth in the room. Damn it, I have lived in the greatest houses of the land. I have served Queen Elizabeth and I count Robert Dudley and William Cecil as my personal friends, but I could bite my tongue when I hear the words come out of my mouth clotted with the Derbyshire burr. I flush with embarrassment. “Would you like a glass of wine or a mulled ale against the cold?” I ask, taking extra care with my speech and sounding now stilted and false.
“Now, what do you like?” She turns to me as if she is truly interested in my tastes.
“I’d have a glass of mulled ale,” I say. “I brought it from my brewhouse at Chatsworth.”
She smiles. Her teeth are small and sharp, like a kitten’s. “Parfait! Let’s have that then!” she says, as if this is to be a delightful treat. “Your husband, his lordship, has told me you are a great manager of your houses. I am sure that you have everything that is the very best.”
I nod to the groom of the servery and know that he will bring everything. I smile at George, who has thrown off his own traveling cloak and is standing at the fireside. We both of us will stand until she invites us to sit, and seeing George, an earl in his own house, standing like a lad before his master, I realize for the first time that we have not allowed a guest into our house but rather that we have joined the court of a queen, and that from now on everything will have to be done as she wishes, and not how I prefer.
1569, WINTER, TUTBURY CASTLE: MARY
And what d’you think of my lady Bess?” Mary Seton asks me, speaking French for greater discretion, a hint of malice in her voice. “Is she as you expected? Worse?”
Now they are gone and we are alone in these pitiful little rooms, I can lean back in my chair and let the pain and exhaustion seep through my body. The ache in my side is especially bad tonight. Mary kneels at my feet and unties the laces on my boots and gently pulls them off my cold feet.
“Oh, I heard so much about what a woman of sense she is and what a grand manager of business that I was expecting a Florentine banker at the very least,” I say, turning the criticism.
“She won’t be like Lady Scrope at Bolton Castle,” Mary warns me. She puts my boots to dry at the fireside and sits back on her heels. “I don’t think she has any sympathy for you and your cause. Lady Scrope was a good friend.”
I shrug. “Her ladyship thought I was the heroine of a fairy tale,” I say irritably. She was one of those who sees me as a queen of ballads. A tragic queen with a beautiful childhood in France and then a lonely widowhood in Scotland. A balladeer would describe me married to the beautiful weakling Darnley, but longing for a strong man to rescue me. A troubadour would describe me as doomed from the moment of my birth, a beautiful princess born under a dark star. It doesn’t matter. People always make up stories about princesses. It comes to us with the crown. We have to carry it as lightly as we can. If a girl is both beautiful and a princess, as I have been all my life, then she will have adherents who are worse than enemies. For most of