Page 175 of A Column of Fire

They had had this discussion several times, and each time Mary came to the same conclusion.

She went on: ‘Elizabeth may be a Protestant, but she believes that a monarch who has been anointed with holy oils – as I was when I was nine months old – rules by divine right. She cannot validate a usurper such as my brother James – she is in too much danger of being usurped herself.’

Alison was not sure how precarious Elizabeth’s position was. She had been queen for ten years without serious opposition. But perhaps all monarchs felt vulnerable.

Mary went on: ‘Elizabeth must help me regain my throne.’

‘No one else thinks that.’

It was true. All the noblemen who had fought at Langside and had accompanied Mary on her flight south were opposed to her plan.

But she would make up her own mind, as always. ‘I’m right,’ she said. ‘And they’re wrong.’

Mary had always been wilful, Alison thought, but this was almost suicidal.

Mary stood up. ‘It’s time to go.’

They went outside. George and Willie were waiting in front of the church, with a farewell party of noblemen and a small group of servants who would accompany the queen. They mounted horses and followed a grassy track alongside a stream that ran, gurgling and chuckling, through the abbey grounds towards the sea. The path went through spring-green woodland sprinkled with wild flowers, then the vegetation changed to tough gorse bushes splashed with deep-golden-yellow blossoms. Spring blooms signalled hope, but Alison had none.

They reached a wide pebble beach where the stream emptied into the sea.

A fishing boat waited at a crude wooden jetty.

On the jetty, Mary stopped, turned, and spoke directly to Alison in a low voice. ‘You don’t have to come,’ she said.

It was true. Alison could have walked away. Mary’s enemies would have left her alone, seeing no danger: they would think a mere lady-in-waiting could not organize a counter-revolution, and they would be right. Alison had an amiable uncle in Stirling who would take her in. She might marry again: she was certainly young enough.

But the prospect of freedom without Mary seemed the most dismal of all possible outcomes. She had spent her life serving Mary. Even during the long empty weeks and months at Loch Leven she had wanted nothing else. She was imprisoned, not by stone walls, but by her love.

‘Well?’ said Mary. ‘Will you come?’

‘Of course I will,’ Alison said.

They got into the boat.

‘We could still go to France,’ Alison said desperately.

Mary smiled. ‘There is one factor you overlook,’ she said. ‘The Pope and all the monarchs of Europe believe that Elizabeth is an illegitimate child. Therefore she was never entitled to the throne of England.’ She paused, looking across the twenty miles of water to the far side of the estuary. Following her gaze Alison saw, dimmed by haze, the low green hills of England. ‘And if Elizabeth is not queen of England,’ said Mary, ‘then I am.’

*

‘SCOTTISHMARY HASarrived in Carlisle,’ said Ned Willard to Queen Elizabeth, in the presence chamber at White Hall palace.

The queen expected Ned to know such things, and he made it his job to have answers ready. That was why she had made him Sir Ned.

‘She’s moved into the castle there,’ Ned went on, ‘and the deputy governor of Carlisle has written to you asking what he should do with her.’

Carlisle was in the far north-west corner of England, and close to the Scottish border, which was why there was a fortress there.

Elizabeth paced the room, her magnificent silk gown rustling with her impatient steps. ‘What the devil shall I tell him?’

Elizabeth was thirty-four. For ten years she had ruled England with a firm hand. She had a confident grasp of European politics, navigating those treacherous tides and undercurrents with Sir William Cecil as her pilot. But she did not know what to do about Mary. The queen of the Scots was a problem with no satisfactory solution.

‘I can’t have Scottish Mary running around England, stirring up discontent among the Catholics,’ Elizabeth said with frustration. ‘They would start saying she is the rightful queen, and we’d have a rebellion to deal with before you could say transubstantiation.’

Cecil, the lawyer, said: ‘You don’t have to let her stay. She is a foreign monarch on English soil without your permission, which is at least a discourtesy and could even be interpreted as an invasion.’

‘People would call me heartless,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Throwing her to the Scottish wolves.’ Ned knew that Elizabeth could be heartless when it suited her. However, she was always sensitive to what the English people would think of her actions.