But one day she could not restrain herself. “My lord Buckingham I hear is going to Spain with the Prince.”

“Is it so then?”

“My lord Buckingham—that upstart Villiers. A Duke no less!”

Robert shrugged his shoulders. But he pictured the scene at Court so well; James, grown older now, but no less affectionate, he was sure; and at his feet the handsome man, seated on the stool once occupied by himself.

“They say there is no end to the honors that man has taken to himself.”

“It may well be.”

“You do not care?”

“I am past caring.”

“I am not then. And never shall be.”

“That is a tragedy for you.”

She turned on him angrily; his calmness maddened her, the knowledge that he had been able to build a life for himself out of these ruins, while she had failed, was more than she could bear.

“It might never have happened. You could have persuaded James. You should have been more subtle … a little more like his newest friend, my Lord Buckingham.”

“And you, Madam,” he retorted, “should never have stained your hands with the blood of my friend.”

She turned away and ran to her bedchamber where she locked herself in and wept until she believed she had no tears left. Tears of rage and frustration.

“Better would it have been if they had taken me to Tyburn,” she cried. “Better if they had hanged me by the neck as they did poor Anne Turner. Anything would have been more desirable than this life of mine.”

After that they avoided each other. It was better so.

In one of his favorite palaces—Theobald’s in the parish of Cheshunt—the King lay dying.