LEGACY the acclaimed novel of Queen Eliz - By Susan Kay Page 0,1

had seen him…”

“Oh, I’ve seen him, several times. Bold little devil, isn’t he? If he survives the attention of your poker, I shall try my hand at taming him.”

Markham straightened up and looked round with the poker suspended in her hand. “Tame him?” she echoed, stupid with disbelief. “You can’t tame a Tower rat—they’re flea-bitten and vicious.”

“So are most men!” The girl smiled and stretched her cramped limbs. “Shall I tame one of them instead? They too make diverting pets, you know.”

Markham laughed nervously. “Wouldn’t you rather have a dog, madam?”

“Ah no—too loyal! They present no challenge.” Behind the girl’s steady eyes a shadow stirred, darkening them to the hue of gleaming wet pitch. “My mother had a dog once. She used to make it jump through a burning hoop to prove its devotion to her, until she found my father did it better. He jumped through that hoop for over six years. When he finally got tired of performing for her amusement he killed her. And that’s what makes men such interesting pets, Markham—you never know when they’re going to turn and bite.”

Markham sank on to the stone seat beside her, chilled into silence. Between them the candle flared in a draught, sending ripples of light over the girl’s angular face.

Strictly speaking it was not a beautiful face by conventional standards, but it was curiously arresting. Elizabeth Tudor was a labyrinth. She drew people, without conscious effort, into the maze of her own personality and abandoned them there, leaving them to find their own way out again—if they could. Most found they were unable to, many never even tried. And those few who succeeded were troubled by a vague sense of loss for the rest of their days. Isabella Markham, already safely in love with a young man languishing within these same walls, would be one of those few who held a lifeline to the outer world.

She looked up and found Elizabeth’s eyes upon her.

“You’re cold, Belle. Go and sit by the fire before it goes out.”

Markham resisted the narcotic of her presence, that instinctive automatic inclination to obey her without question.

“I’m not cold, truly, madam.” She hesitated. “I’m curious.”

“Curious?” Elizabeth’s eyes were suddenly veiled and wary.

“About tonight—about the man you’re waiting for. Is he to be no more than a pet to you?”

“Pet, playmate, partner,” said Elizabeth slowly, turning the words around in her mind as a squirrel turns a nut. “How shall I know until he comes?”

“He’s not coming now,” said Markham darkly. “I knew it would be prevented. And to take such a risk in the first place—oh, madam, it’s so unlike you!”

“Is it?” Again that strange, maddening smile.

“You know it is! All these years you’ve been so careful, ever since—” She stopped and looked away. “Ever since the Admiral.”

Elizabeth put one hand on Markham’s shoulder and tilted her chin gently upwards.

“I can only die once, however many crimes are laid to my charge. I’ve lived a nun’s life since I was fifteen and where has all that circumspection brought me? Only here to this prison cell. Don’t you see, Belle, our fate is written in the stars, we can’t alter it. And if I’m to go to my mother’s death this spring, careful is not a word I wish to take with me.”

Markham said nothing. She was very close to tears. At length she rose, curtsied and went obediently to her seat at the hearth, leaving Elizabeth to rub the black glass where her breath had misted it, and stare out again towards the river.

The sand in the hour-glass swallowed up another hour and the rats chattered in the wainscoting; beyond the brooding fortress the east wind wailed peevishly like a spoilt and fretful child.

Part I

The Girl

“Affection? Affection is false.”

—Elizabeth

Chapter 1

Her path to the tower wound back beyond her birth, to the chance meeting of a man and a woman more than a quarter of a century before that windswept April night of her imprisonment.

It was an uneventful meeting in itself, with nothing exchanged except the electric glance of a lusty man and the coyly inviting look of an ambitious girl; yet it changed the whole course of British history. It was the beginning of a cataclysmic love affair that rocked Europe and turned all England upside down, spawning in its wake a whole new Church, but only one living child: Elizabeth.

Rank and virility had accustomed the eighth Henry to the quick surrender of eager women, and when he misread that look of promise in