have to do it. For a moment I consider going to find Bess so that we can read his letter together. But then curiosity is too much for me and I open it. A sealed package falls from the inside, into my hands with this note:
Shrewsbury, Please convey this letter to the Queen of Scots. It is a proposal of marriage from me and has the blessing of all the other lords. I trust to your discretion. I have not yet told Her Grace the Queen of my intention, but Leicester, Arundel, and Pembroke all think this a good solution to the current difficulty, returning her to her throne with an English connection and preventing a foreign husband. It was suggested by the Scots lords themselves, as a way to guarantee her safe return with a reliable Protestant Englishman at her side. I hope she will marry me. I believe it to be her safest route, indeed her only route,
Norfolk
I think I had better take this to Bess.
1569, SPRING, TUTBURY CASTLE: BESS
Our days have fallen into a rhythm dictated by the queen, who rules this castle as her own palace, as I suppose she should. In the morning she prays and hears Mass in her own way with her secretary who, I imagine, is an ordained priest. I am supposed not to know, and so I do not ask, though I am required to give him four square meals a day and fish on Friday.
I have made sure that my household know that they are not to join nor even to listen to the heresies that take place behind the closed doors of her lodgings, and so I hope to confine to her rooms the confusion and distress that always follows the rule of Rome. But once she has done with heretical mutterings, and taken her breakfast in her rooms, she likes to ride out accompanied by my husband the earl. She has ten horses that are taking up ten loose boxes in our stables and are feeding well on our oats. She rides with my lord and his guard in the morning while I go to the small parlor that I have set aside for my business and I meet with the stewards of all my houses and ventures who report to me either by letter or, when there is trouble, in person.
This is a system of my own devising, based on my first lessons from my dear Cavendish with the housekeeping books. Each manor, each house has its own book; each has to meet its own costs. By treating each parcel of land as a separate kingdom I make sure that they each make money. It may seem obvious—but this is unique. I know no other landlord who does it. Unlike me, my lord’s stewards who work in the old ways bundle all their accounts together, use land as security against loans for cash, endow it, buy it, sell it, mortgage it, and entail it away on heirs. At best they can always keep my lord’s treasure room rich with cash, but at worst they never know what is earned and what is borrowed and what is owed. Badly handled, a whole fortune can slip through the fingers of a landlord and go out of the family altogether. They can never know if they are in profit or loss; there is a continual exchange of land into debt, into cash, and back to land again. The value of the land changes, even the value of the currency changes, and this is beyond their control—they can never know for sure what is happening. This is the way that the nobility run their business, grandly but vaguely, whereas I run mine like a poor woman’s household and know to a penny what I am worth at the end of every week. Of course, they start with an enormous fortune. All they have to do is not to squander their wealth, whereas I started from nothing and nothing is easily counted. But a landlord like me—a newcomer—has to watch every penny and every acre, has to be alert to every change. It is a different view of the land, and my view is a novelty. Never before was there a landlord in England like me. Never in the world, for all I know, was there a woman in business like me.
Only a trader at his stall, only a cobbler at his last, would understand the pleasure I have at knowing the