I can hardly believe that the day has come, but it is spring, the land is unlocked from winter, the streams are running alongside the lane, and both my imprisoned cousin Mary Queen of Scots and I are to be freed. The season that has always called to me in the singing birds is the season that will see me walk free. Queen Mary is to return to Scotland and take up her throne. The inquiry against her has collapsed, and Elizabeth knows she cannot keep her royal cousin locked up with no good reason. She is not even going to keep me locked up, and I don’t have Philip II and the Catholic kings advocating for me. It is as if Elizabeth has looked into the horror that she was making, seen the road she was walking. If she proved the case against her cousin Mary, she would have had to execute her. If she continued to imprison me indefinitely, what is it but a death sentence? Changeable, fearful, Elizabeth turns from persecuting her heirs to setting us free in the hope that Mary in Edinburgh and I far away will trouble her less than when she holds us captive.
“You are to go to Sir Thomas Gresham,” my stepgrandmother says. “I shall miss you, my dear, but I shall be glad to know that you are staying in London, and when there is next a vacancy at court, you will become a lady-in-waiting. You will return to your former place.”
“She thinks that I will return to serve her?” I ask incredulously.
My stepgrandmother laughs. “You will. It is the best way to demonstrate that you are no danger to her, you are no rival. Remember her own sister imprisoned her and then called her to court. She thinks she can do the same with you.”
“But I will be free?”
“You will be free.”
I take her hands. “I will never forget that you took me in,” I tell her.
“That was nothing,” she says wryly. “Don’t forget that I took the damned monkey, too.”