CHAPTER ONE
Greenwich Palace
21 December 1554
I have but a few minutes before Carrie must dress me for tonight’s festivities. Christmas is nearly here, but tonight’s celebration is rather more pagan. There is to be an eclipse of the moon, and coming as it does on the winter solstice when darkness claims its longest reign, even the most devout are unsettled.
So why not dance and drink and throw our merriment into the dark as a challenge?
Also, there is a visitor at court. His name is John Dee and he is reputed one of the finest minds of the age. He has come to court in the Duke of Northumberland’s company, and William has commanded him to give a private reading of our stars. Only the four of us—for it would not do to let our secrets, past or future, slip into wider circulation.
Despite the cold, every courtyard at Greenwich was filled and more. No one wanted to miss the rare and possibly apocalyptic sight of the moon vanishing into blackness before their eyes. Minuette had barely room to shiver beneath her fur-lined cloak, so closely were people packed on this terrace overlooking the Thames.
She had managed to keep away from the royal party; below her she saw moonlight glinting off Elizabeth’s red-gold hair. William stood near his sister, surrounded as always by men and women. While everyone else’s eyes turned to the heavens, Minuette’s sought a familiar figure in the flickering torchlight. She rather hoped she did not find Dominic standing near William.
A whisper ran collectively through the crowd, transmitting itself more to Minuette’s body than her ear. She looked up: overhead, the edge of the moon’s circle was eaten away. Despite herself, she felt her pulse quicken and wondered what terrible things this might portend.
More terrible than a star’s violent fall?The voice in her head was Dominic’s, an echo of his impatient skepticism.
Minuette fingered the pendant encircling her neck, tracing the shape of the filigreed star, and smiled. This eclipse is no portent of doom, she assured herself, but a sign of great wonder. And that I can believe.
She watched the blackness bite away at the moon until it was half covered and still moving relentlessly onward. There were murmurs around her, some nervous laughter.
A hand came from behind, anchoring her waist with a solidness she could feel even through the layers of fur and velvet and linen. And then, after much too long, a second hand followed until she was encircled. Minuette made herself keep her eyes open, made herself stand straight and not lean back into the comforting weight behind her. Or perhaps comforting was not the right word—for her heart quickened and her breath skipped.
Although she could count on two hands the times Dominic had touched her since the night of her betrothal, her body knew him instantly, as though it had been waiting for this part of her all her life.
Only in the dark did he dare to touch her, for only in the dark could they remain unseen. No one must know, not yet. Not a single whisper must cross the court while William (openly betrothed to the French king’s daughter) threw himself in secret at Minuette’s feet, offering his hand, his throne, and his country to her. It would take time for the king’s infatuation to die. And, until it did, no one must suspect either William’s passion or Dominic’s love.
So Minuette laughed and played and worked and flirted as though everything were normal—as though William had not lost his mind and thought himself in love with her—as though her own heart was not fluttering madly inside a cage, wanting only to wing itself to Dominic—as though she had no secrets and everything was as it had been before. She saw Dominic every day and behaved toward him the same as always: playful and young and oh-so-slightly resentful of his lectures.
And then, like tonight, he would touch her, and she thought she might weep with wanting to turn into him and cling.
Instead, she kept her eyes open and directed at the sky as the moon’s last sliver gave up its fight and slid into nothing.
Gasps went up from the crowd, and in that covering moment, Minuette felt Dominic’s mouth alight softly just below her left ear and linger. She did close her eyes then, and swayed back slightly as his arms tightened around her waist and they both forgot where they were and who, and in a moment she would turn and their lips would meet and she might die if she waited any longer—
A great cheer exploded around and below them, and Minuette’s eyes flew open to see the moon pulling itself away from the darkness. By the tightness of Dominic’s grip on her waist, she knew his frustration. But he was—always had been—the disciplined one.
Within seconds she was standing alone once more, only warm cheeks and quick breathing to betray what no one had seen.
What no one must ever see.
Greenwich Palace had always been a dwelling of pleasure and luxury, of laughter and flirtation, of light and merriment. It was situated on the Thames five miles east of London, close enough to the city for easy access yet far enough to be well out of the crowds and squalor and pestilence. The last two King Henrys had expanded the complex, Elizabeth’s grandfather facing it in red brick and her father adding a banqueting hall and enormous tiltyard. Her father had been born here, as had Elizabeth herself. A beautiful palace for a beautiful court.
On this longest night of the year, the palace blazed with candlelight and what heat the fires and braziers failed to provide was made up for by the great press of bodies. Men and women dressed in their finest, drinking and dancing and circling around their king as though he were the center of their world.
But what happens to that world, Elizabeth wondered, when the center fails to hold?
Ignoring the chatter of voices directed at her, she watched her younger brother, worried and angry with herself for worrying. When William had returned from France last month with a treaty and a betrothal, he’d poured out to his sister his ardent love for Minuette along with his plans to wed her, and ever since Elizabeth had carried a thorn of anxiety that made itself felt at the most inconvenient times. It’s not as though he’s being indiscreet, she told herself firmly. He’s behaving precisely as a young king of eighteen should behave. Dressed in crimson and gold, William flirted with every female in sight (and even a man or two), he drank (but not so heavily as to lose control of his tongue), and he carried on several layers of conversation with the French ambassador at once.
And he had not been nearer to Minuette than ten feet all evening.
Elizabeth, being determinedly talked at by a persistent young cleric, swung her gaze to where her chief lady-in-waiting held court of her own, surrounded by a gaggle of men, young and old, all clearly besotted by Minuette’s honey-light hair and her graceful height and the appealing knowledge that she was an orphan in the care and keeping of the royal court. With the influence she held in her relationships to Elizabeth and William, Minuette would have drawn an equal crowd even if she had been pockmarked and fat. But the men would not then have been eyeing her with quite the same expression.
A voice, very near and very familiar, broke her distraction. “How long,” Robert Dudley said conversationally as he neatly cut out the disappointed and ignored cleric, “is your brother going to continue baiting the French ambassador? William has the treaty he wanted—why make the poor man suffer?”
“Because he can,” Elizabeth replied tartly. “And you do the same—only with less care. Everyone knows your father continues to grumble about peace with France. How hard it is for him to swallow, a pact with the devil Catholics.”
