you feel glad to be alive. Her smile is like that, is my first foolish thought, her smile is 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 lady-in-waiting 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 ladies-in-waiting? This is Lady Mary Seton, and here is Lady Agnes Livingstone,’ she says, and the women and I curtsey 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 brew-house 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 travelling 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 realise 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 fairytale,’ 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 my life I have been adored by fools and hated by people of good sense, and they all make up stories about me in which I am either a saint or a whore. But I am above these judgements, I am a queen. ‘I expect no sympathy from her ladyship,’ I say bitterly. ‘She is my cousin the queen’s most trusted servant, as is the earl. Otherwise we would not be housed by them. I am sure she is hopelessly prejudiced against me.’
‘A staunch Protestant,’ Mary warns me. ‘Brought up in the Brandon family, companion to Lady Jane Grey, I am told. And her former husband made his fortune from the ruin of the monasteries. They say that every bench in her house is a pew.’
I say nothing; but the small incline of my head tells her to go on.
‘That husband served Thomas Cromwell in the Court of Augmentations,’ she continues softly. ‘And made a fortune.’
‘There would be a great profit in the destruction of the religious houses and the shrines,’ I say thoughtfully. ‘But I thought it was the king who took the profit.’
‘They say that Bess’s husband took his fee for the work, and then some more,’ she whispers. ‘He took bribes from the monks to spare their houses, or to undervalue them. That he took a fee for winking when treasure was smuggled out. But then he went back later and threw them out anyway, and took all the treasure they thought they had saved.’
‘A hard man,’ I observe.
‘She was his sole heir,’ she tells me. ‘She had him change his will so that he disinherited his own brother. He did not even leave money to his children by her. When he died he left every penny of his ill-gained wealth to her, in her name alone, and set her up as a lady. It was from his springboard that she could vault to marry her next husband, and she did the same with him: took everything he owned, disinherited his own kin. At his death he left it all to her. That is how she got enough wealth to be a countess: by seducing men and taking them from their families.’
‘So – a woman of few scruples,’ I remark, thinking of a mother disinheriting her own children. ‘A woman who is the greater power in the household, who has things done to her own advantage.’
‘A forward woman,’ Mary Seton says disapprovingly. ‘Without respect for her husband and his family. A crowing hen. But a woman who knows the value of money.’ She is thinking as I am – that a woman who does not scruple to make her fortune from the destruction of the church of God can surely be bribed to look the other way just once, for just one night.
‘And him? The Earl of Shrewsbury?’
I smile. ‘D’you know, I think he is all but untouchable? All he seems to care for is his own honour and his dignity; and of all men in England, he must be safe in that.’
1569, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Bess
‘How much are we being paid for her?’ I ask George as we take a glass of spiced wine seated either side of our bedroom fire. Behind us the maids are turning down our bed for the night.
He gives a little start and I realise that I am, once again, too blunt. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I say quickly. ‘Only I need to know for my book of accounts. Is the court to pay us a fee?’
‘Her Majesty the Queen graciously assured me that she will meet all the costs,’ he says.
‘All of them?’ I ask. ‘Are we to send her a note of our expenses, monthly?’
He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Bess, dearest wife … this is an honour; to serve is a privilege that many seek but only we were chosen. The queen has assured me that she will provide. Of course we will benefit from our service to her. She has sent goods from her own household for her cousin, has she not? We have the queen’s own furniture in our house?’
‘Yes,’ I say hesitantly, hearing the pride in his voice. ‘But really, it is only some