The rebel heart

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It should be more difficult to kill a Queen. The final simplicity of the act diminished it, reduced it to something mundane. The King of Spain, the King of France, the King of Scotland, all gathering like vultures over the throne of England; its aged, childless Queen surely soon to die. So what if that death were hastened? What difference in a few months? Or a year? To kill an old woman was not to go against nature, merely to speed it up a little.

The winter had been bitter, and a biting, cutting wind hacked through London, as if determined to scour the flesh off human backs. The Queen was an extraordinary sixty-five years old, and felt the cold more and more. The order had gone out to stoke up the fires. The chimneys in the Palace were badly swept, and the sharp tang of woodsmoke mixed with the smooth perfumes and acrid sweat of overdressed men. The wonderful symmetry of the dark, arched beams paraded the length of the Great Hall, impervious to the squabbling beneath.

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