“Praise be. What’s to happen?”


He breaks off as she has pulled up her horse ahead of us and turned to call to me. “Chowsbewwy, can I gallop here?”


The track ahead of her is even and grassy and rises steadily uphill. My heart is always in my mouth when she thunders off like a cavalry charge but the going is firm and she should be safe. “Not too fast,” I say, like a worried father. “Don’t go too fast,” and she waves her whip like a girl, wheels her horse, and takes off like a mad thing with her guards and Westmorland trailing behind her, hopelessly outpaced.


“Good God!” exclaims Percy. “She can ride!”


“She’s always like this,” I say, and we let our horses go after her for a long breathless gallop until she pulls up and we all come tumbling up to her side and find her laughing with her hat blown askew and her thick dark hair falling down.


“That was so good!” she says. “Chowsbewwy, did I frighten you again?”


“Why can you not ride at a normal pace?” I exclaim and she laughs again.


“Because I love to be free,” she says. “I love to feel the horse stretch out and the thunder of his hooves and the wind in my face and knowing we can go on and on forever.”


She turns her horse for she cannot go on and on forever, or at least not today, and leads the way back to the castle.


“I have prayed every night to see her restored to her own again,” I say quietly to my friend Percy, and I hope he cannot hear the tenderness in my voice. “She is not a woman who can be confined in one place. She does indeed need to be free. It is like mewing up a falcon to keep her in one small place. It is cruel. I have felt as if I were her jailer. I have felt that I was being cruel.”


He shoots a sideways look at me, as if considering something. “But you would never have let her go,” he suggests in an undertone. “You would never have turned a blind eye if someone had come to rescue her.”


“I serve Queen Elizabeth,” I say simply. “As my family have served every King of England since William of Normandy. And I have given my word as an English nobleman. I am not free to turn a blind eye. I am honor bound. But it does not stop me caring for her. It does not stop me longing to see her as she should be—free as a bird in the sky.”


He nods and compresses his lips on his thought. “You have heard she is to marry Howard, and they will be restored to Scotland together?”


“She did me the honor of telling me. And Howard wrote to me. When did the queen give the marriage her blessing?”


Percy shakes his head. “She doesn’t know yet. She flies into such a temper over the marriages of others that Howard is waiting to pick his time to tell her. Dudley says he will broach it when the time is right but he is delaying too long. There are rumors, of course, and Norfolk has had to deny it twice already. He’ll probably tell her on the summer progress. Dudley has known from the beginning; he says he’ll introduce the idea gently. It makes sense for everyone; it guarantees her safety when she is back on her throne.”


“What does Cecil think of it?”


He shoots me a quick hidden smile. “Cecil knows nothing of it, and there are those who think that Cecil can steep in his ignorance until the matter is signed and sealed.”


“It would be a pity if he advised against it. He is no friend of Howard’s,” I say cautiously.


“Of course he is no friend of Howard’s, nor yours, nor mine. Name me one friend of Cecil’s! Who likes or trusts him?” he demands bluntly. “How should any of us befriend him? Who is he? Where does he come from? Who even knew him before she made him steward of everything? But this is the end for Cecil’s power,” Percy says in a low voice to me. “Howard hopes to drive him out; this is all part of the same plan. Howard hopes to rid us of Cecil, of his enmity to the Spanish, and to save the Scots queen from his spite, and to see him reduced at court, perhaps thrown out altogether.”


“Thrown out?”


“Thomas Cromwell rose greater and Thomas Cromwell was stripped of his badge of office by a Howard at a Privy Council meeting. Don’t you think such a thing could happen again?”


I try to check my smile at this but it is no good. He can see my pleasure in the very thought of it.


“You like him no more than the rest of us!” Percy says triumphantly. “We will have him thrown down, Shrewsbury. Are you with us?”


“I cannot do anything which would conflict with my honor,” I start.


“Of course not! Would I suggest such a thing? We are your brother peers. Howard and Arundel and Lumley and the two of us are all sworn to see England in the hands of her proper rulers again. The last thing we want to do is to demean ourselves. But Cecil pulls us down in every direction. The penny-pinching he wants at court, the enmity to the Scots queen, the persecution of anyone but the strictest of Puritans, and”—he drops his voice—” the endless recruitment of spies. A man cannot so much as order a meal in a London tavern without someone sending the bill of fare to Cecil. He’ll have a spy in your own household, you know, Talbot. He knows everything about all of us. And he gathers the information and draws it together and waits to use it, when the time suits him.”


“He could have nothing on me,” I say staunchly.


Percy laughs. “When you refused to name the Scots queen as a whore at his inquiry?” he jeers. “You were his enemy from that moment. He will have a folder of papers with your name on it, gossip from the backstairs, rumors from bad tenants, envy from your debtors, and when the time suits him, or when he wants you humbled, he will take it to the queen and tell her she cannot trust you.”


“She would never…”


“He will have your personal servants in the Tower within the day, and a confession racked out of them that you are Queen Mary’s secret admirer.”


“No servant of mine…”


“No man in the world can resist the rack for long, nor the press, nor the iron maiden. Do you know that they tear out men’s fingernails now? They hang them from their wrists. There is not a man in the kingdom that can bear such pain. Every suspect says whatever he tells them to say within three days.”


“He would not use such things on honest men…”


“Shrewsbury, he does. You don’t know how it is in London now. There is no one can stop him. He uses what means he likes, and he tells the queen that these are such dangerous times as need dangerous measures. And she is so fearful and so persuaded by him that she lets him do his dirty business as he wishes. He has a whole army of secret men who do his bidding and know everything. Men are arrested in the night and taken to the Tower or to hidden houses and not a justice of the peace gives a warrant. It is all on Cecil’s say-so.


“Not even the Star Chamber orders these arrests; the queen does not sign for them; no one but Cecil authorizes them. It is all done in secret, on his word alone. The queen trusts him and his crew of informers and torturers, and the prisoners stumble out of the Tower sworn to report to Cecil for the rest of their lives. He is making a Spanish Inquisition on innocent Englishmen. Who can say that he won’t start to burn us? He is destroying our freedoms. He is the enemy of the lords and of the people alike and we must stop him. He will destroy us, he will destroy the queen. A man truly loyal to the queen must be Cecil’s enemy.”


The horses stretch their necks as we go up the hill to the manor, and I loosen my reins and say nothing.


“You know I am right,” he says.


I sigh.


“She will make him a baron.”


My horse flinches as I jerk on the reins. “Never.”


“She will. She pours wealth on him and she will pour honors too. You can expect him to ask for your stepdaughter’s hand in marriage for his son. Perhaps the queen will request that you marry your Elizabeth to the dwarf Robert Cecil with his humpback. Cecil will grow great. He will have a title to match your own. And we will none of us be safe to speak our minds in our own homes. He is making us a kingdom of spies and suspects commanded only by himself.”


I am so shocked that I cannot speak for a moment.


“He has to be stopped,” Percy says. “He is another Wolsey, another Cromwell. Another upstart who has come from nothing by slavish drudgery. He is a bad advisor; he is a dangerous voice in her counsels. And like both of them he will be thrown down by us lords if we act together. He has to be thrown down before he becomes overmighty. I swear to you he is a danger to the commonwealth of England. We cannot allow him to be made a lord of the realm.”


“A baron? You are certain she is going to make him a baron?”


“She pays him a fortune. We have to stop him, before he becomes too great.”


“I know it,” I say heavily. “But a baron!”


The queen is already through the gateway. Someone else will have to help her down from the saddle, I cannot hurry to get there in time to be the one to lift her and hold her.


“You will dine with us?” I ask. I cannot see who is holding her horse and who is lifting her down. “Bess will be glad to see you.”


“Cecil will know we have been here,” he says. “Be warned.”


“Surely, I can invite a guest to dinner in my own house,” I exclaim. “The queen will dine apart from us in her own rooms. There is no danger. What business is it of Cecil’s?”