to resist the terrors that Cecil frightens her with. It will not be easy for her to be generous to a younger and more beautiful kinswoman. Elizabeth won her throne after a lifetime of plotting. She cannot help but fear an heir with a claim to the throne, and every reason to conspire. She knows what it is like to be the heir excluded from court. She knows that when she was the heir excluded from court she spun one plot after another, murderous rebellions that nearly succeeded in destroying her half-sister and bringing down the throne. She knows what a false friend she was to her sister – it will be impossible for her to trust her cousin who is, just as she was, a young princess impatient of waiting.
She beams at me. ‘So, Talbot. This brings me to your task.’
I wait.
‘I want you to house the Scots queen for me, and then take her back to her kingdom when the time is right,’ she says.
‘House her?’ I repeat.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Cecil will prepare for her return to Scotland; in the meantime, you shall house her and entertain her, treat her as a queen, and when Cecil sends you word, escort her back to Edinburgh, and return her to her throne.’
It is an honour so great that I can hardly catch my breath at the thought of it. To be host to the Queen of Scotland and to return her to her kingdom in triumph! Cecil must be sick with envy; he has no house half as grand as Bess’s at Chatsworth, though he is building like a madman. But not fast enough, so she will have to come to us. I am the only nobleman who could do the task. Cecil has no house and Norfolk, as a widower, has no wife. No-one has a grand house and a well-loved loyal reliable wife like Bess.
‘I am honoured,’ I say calmly. ‘You can trust me.’ Of course, I think of Bess, and how thrilled she will be that Chatsworth will house a queen at last. We will be the envy of every family in England, they will all want to visit us. We shall have open house all the summer, we shall be a royal court. I shall hire musicians and masquers, dancers and players. We will be one of the royal courts of Europe – and it will all be under my roof.
She nods. ‘Cecil will make the arrangements with you.’
I step backwards. She smiles at me, the dazzling smile that she gives to the crowds when they call out her name: the Tudor charm at full meridian. ‘I am grateful to you, Talbot,’ she says. ‘I know you will keep her safe in these troubled times, and see her safely home again. It will only be for the summer and you will be richly rewarded.’
‘It will be my honour to serve you,’ I say. ‘As always.’ I bow again and walk backwards and then out of the presence chamber. Only when the door is closed and the guards before it cross their halberds once more do I allow myself to whistle at my luck.
1568, Winter, Bolton Castle: Mary
My faithful friend, Bishop John Lesley of Ross, who has followed me into exile, saying that he cannot stay at home in comfort beside an empty throne, writes to me in our secret code from London. He says that although Elizabeth’s third and final inquiry in Westminster Palace could find nothing against me, yet the French ambassador has not yet been told to prepare for my journey to Paris. He is afraid that Elizabeth will find an excuse to keep me in England for another week, another month, God only knows how long; she has the patience of a tormentor. But I have to trust to her friendship, I have to rely on her good sense as a cousin and a fellow queen. Whatever my doubts about her – a bastard and a heretic though she is – I have to remember that she has written to me with love and promised her support, she has sent me a ring as pledge of my safety forever.
But while she hesitates and considers, all this while, my son is in the hands of my enemies, and his tutors are Protestants. He is two years old; what they tell him of me, I cannot bear to imagine. I have to get back to him before they poison him against me.
I have men and women loyal to me, waiting for my return, I cannot make them wait forever. Bothwell, imprisoned in Denmark on a ridiculous charge of bigamy, will be planning his own escape, thinking ahead to setting me free, determined that we shall be reunited on the throne of Scotland. With or without him I have to get back and claim my throne. I have God’s hand of destiny on my life, I was born to rule Scotland. I cannot refuse the challenge to win back my throne. My mother gave her life to keep the kingdom for me, I shall honour her sacrifice and pass it on to my heir, my son, her grandson, my little boy, James, Prince James, heir to Scotland and to England, my precious son.
I cannot wait to see what Elizabeth will do. I cannot wait for her slowly to act. I don’t know if my son is safely guarded, I don’t even know if he is well-nursed. His false uncle, my half-brother, has never loved him; what if he has him killed? I left him with trustworthy guardians in Stirling Castle; but what if they are besieged? I dare not sit here quietly and wait for Elizabeth to forge a treaty with my enemies that sends me on parole to France, or orders me to hide in some convent. I have to get back to Scotland and enter the battle for my throne once more. I did not escape from Lochleven Castle to do nothing. I did not break free from one prison to wait quietly in another. I have to be free.
Nobody can know what this is like for me. Certainly not Elizabeth, who was practically raised in prison, under suspicion from the age of four. She is a woman trained to a cell. But I have been mistress of my own great rooms since I was a girl of eleven in France. My mother insisted I should have my own rooms, my own presence chamber, my own entourage; even as a child I had the ordering of my own household. Then as now, I cannot bear to be constrained; I must be free.
The ambassador bids me keep up my courage and wait for his news. But I cannot just wait. I cannot have patience. I am a young woman in the very prime of my health and beauty and fertility. They have left me to celebrate my twenty-sixth birthday in prison. What do they think they are doing to me? What do they think I will endure? I cannot be confined. I must be free. I am a queen, I was born to command. They will find that I am a dangerous and untamed prisoner. They will find that I will be free.
1568, Winter, Chatsworth House: Bess
Cecil’s clerk writes to tell me that Mary Queen of Scots is not to come to us at Chatsworth, where I could entertain her as she deserves: in a great house with a beautiful park and everything done as it should be. No, she is to come to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire: one of our poorest properties and half-derelict, and I have to turn my life upside down to make this ruin fit for a queen in the middle of winter.
‘If your lord and husband could only have been prevailed on to see all the evidence against her, she could have been returned to Scotland in disgrace already,’ Cecil writes, sweet as an unripe apple, in a postscript. ‘Then we would all have been able to rest easy this Christmastide.’
There is no need for Cecil to reproach me. I warned my lord that the inquiry was a sham and a show, as close to life as are the mummers dressed in motley at Christmas. I told him that if he chose to become a player in this scene of Cecil’s devising then he must follow the playscript word by word. He was not invited there to improvise. He should have found the verdict that Cecil wanted. But he would not. If you hire an honourable man to do dirty work you will find the work honourably done. Cecil chose the wrong lord when he chose my husband to supervise the disgrace of the Scots queen. And so Cecil has no scandal, and no dishonoured queen, and I have no husband at home, and I have to clean and rebuild a derelict castle in the middle of winter.
Cecil says: ‘I am sorry that you have to house this Athalia; but I hope it will not be for long, for certainty, she will follow the destiny of her namesake.’
This obviously means something to Cecil, who has the benefit of a man’s education, but for a woman such as me, the daughter of a farmer, it is as opaque as a code. Fortunately, my darling son Henry is staying with me, on a brief holiday from his place at court. His father, my second husband, Cavendish, left me with instructions and an income to get him educated like