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right-hand man of the French Queen-Dowager, the Regent of Scotland. Henry had been giving advance payment for this work for years; now at last, in his palace of Greenwich just before Christmas, he heard from the murderers’ own lips how they had stabbed the enemy of Christ as he sat in his chair, and hung his body over the wall of his castle at St Andrews.
    Henry, as he made his final payments, reflected that it had been well worth the money. Much as he disliked these ‘ministers of the true religion,’ they would work for Scotland’s alliance with England against the age-old Franco-Scottish alliance favoured by Cardinal Beton and his Regent of Scotland, that damned obstinate, suspicious-minded Frenchwoman who would not entrust her little daughter to his tender avuncular care.
    Edward, now nine years old, a pretty boy with smooth flaxen hair, did not want to be betrothed to a baby. He would rather, if he had to have a cousin, marry the Lady Jane Grey, a year older than himself, though much smaller, who often helped him with his lessons. But Jane in her turn thought him more suited to one of her little sisters. She was undergoing arather solemn adoration for Elizabeth, so much older, by three years, than herself, and wearing her cleverness with so gay and insouciant an air.
    Jane was King Henry’s great-niece, standing in the same relationship to him as the baby Queen of Scots. For Henry had had two sisters, the Tudor Roses they were called when in the splendour of their sumptuous white and red, their blue eyes and golden hair. The elder, the Princess Margaret, had married that strange, beautiful tortured creature, James IV of Scotland, and made a few gallant efforts, but only briefly, to live up to it. When he was killed on Flodden Field, her son, James V, was a year old; when he in his turn died broken-hearted from defeat by the English, his daughter Mary had become Queen of Scots at five days old.
    Henry had been much fonder of his younger sister, Mary Rose, who was lovelier and merrier than Margaret, and did not grow too fat like her; nor did she plague him with long tearful letters and demands for money. For all that, he had made Mary Rose, at eighteen, marry the invalid old French King Louis XII instead of the man of her choice. But Mary had the Tudor way of getting what she wanted; in a few months she had danced the adoring old Frenchman into his grave, avoided the proposals of his young successor, François I, and married her beefy English duke.
    Her granddaughter Jane Grey had inherited none of the glowing colours and bouncing vitality of the two Tudor Roses; she was tiny and pale, with some fair freckles on her straight little nose, which her mother unavailingly scrubbed with all sorts of concoctions, but they remained, with something of Jane’s own persistency. Her eyes and foreheadgave promise of a certain grave beauty, and beneath it an unexpected force of character.
    Her younger sisters, Catherine and Mary, were so small that their mother was afraid they might be dwarfs.
    Taking Elizabeth’s hand before the banquet, Jane whispered as demurely as if she was saying grace, that thank God her parents were away, for it was hell when they were at home. Many children might think it dashing and modern to refer to their parents’ company as hell; not so Jane, that best of all good little girls. Elizabeth was as startled as if a mouse had sworn. ‘The creep-mice’ was her name for the three little Grey cousins; could this one be a shrew-mouse? She looked down at the meek little face under its smoothly parted hair, and saw it set and tense.
    ‘Your mother is very strict, isn’t she?’ Bess whispered back sympathetically.
    ‘She never stops scolding, pinching, and slapping me. However hard I work, it makes no odds. You are lucky to have only a stepmother.’
    And a murderously inclined father? Yes, on the whole Bess thought she was, since he forgot about her for long spaces together, whereas Jane’s mother