confess to a secret lover. “When they visited that night? Did you agree with them that it would be a very good thing for Norfolk, and for yourselves, and a bad thing for Cecil? Did you say it would be good for her to take her throne in Scotland with him as her husband? Did you agree that the queen did not know of it? Did you say anything like that?”
“Yes,” I admit, as reluctantly as an unfaithful husband. “Yes, I think I may have done.”
She throws down the napkin to the floor with the thread and the needle. I have never seen her careless with her work before. “Then you have destroyed us,” she says. “Cecil does not have to make it all one plot. Indeed, it is all different strands of the same plot. You passed her letters from Norfolk, you let her meet with the Northern lords, you spoke with them about the marriage, and you agreed to plot with them against the queen’s advisor and against his policy.”
“What should I have done other?” I shout at her in my own fear. “I am for England! Old England, as it was. My country, my old country! I don’t want Cecil’s England, I want the England of my father! What else should I have done but bring him down?”
The face she turns on me is like stone, if stone could be bitter. “You should have kept me and my fortune safe,” she says, her voice quavering. “I came to you with a good fortune, a great fortune, and it was yours by marriage, all yours. A wife can own nothing in her own name. A wife has to trust her husband with her wealth. I trusted you with mine. I trusted you to keep it safe. When we married, all my properties became yours; all you give me is a wife’s allowance. I trusted you with my wealth, with my houses, with my lands, with my businesses. I gave them to you to keep them safe for me and my children. That is all I asked of you. To keep me and my fortune safe. I am a selfmade woman. You promised that you would keep my fortune safe.”
“You shall have it all back under your own command,” I swear. I am furious with her, still thinking of money at a time like this. “I shall free myself from this shadow on my name. I shall clear my name and the name of my house. And you shall have your own fortune back as your own again. You shall live apart in your own precious house and count your precious ha’pennies. And you shall be sorry, madam, that you and your great friend Cecil ever doubted me.”
Her face crumples at once. “Oh, don’t say it, don’t say it,” she whispers. She comes to me and at the scent of her hair and the touch of her hand I open my arms and she falls into them, closes herself to me, cries against my chest, a weak woman after all.
“There,” I say. “There, there.” Sometimes I ask too much of her. She is only a woman and she takes strange fearful fancies. She cannot think clearly like a man, and she has no education and no reading. She is only a woman: everyone knows that women have no steadiness of mind. I should protect her from the wider world of the court, not complain that she lacks a man’s understanding. I stroke the smoothness of her hair and I feel my love for her from my bowels to my heart.
“I shall go to London,” I promise her quietly. “I shall take you and the queen to Tutbury, and as soon as her new guardian arrives to replace me, I will go to London and tell the queen herself that I knew nothing of any plot. I am guilty of no plot. Everyone knew what I knew. I shall tell her that all I have ever done is to pray for the return of the England of her father. Henry’s England, not Cecil’s England.”
“Anyway Cecil knew, whatever he says now,” Bess declares indignantly, struggling out from my arms. “He knew of this plot long before it was hatched. He knew of the betrothal as well as any of us, as soon as any of us. He could have scotched it in days, even before it started.”
“You are mistaken. He cannot have known. He learned of it only just now, when