Three women wore the crown of England. Not one of them was ever safe.

July 1553. Mary Tudor takes the throne she has wanted since she was a girl, and the cold thing that has lived in her since her mother's disgrace does not lift by one degree. She is Queen of England now, and she is cursed still, and she has begun to understand that a queen has lawful access to other lives, and that a sacrifice must hurt.

Jane Grey reigns for nine days and refuses the crown aloud in front of witnesses, and no working in all of England can reach a soul that has been given wholly to God. So it must be done with a signature instead, and a girl of sixteen goes to the block on Tower Green for a throne she had refused in public and never wanted at all.

And Elizabeth survives. She survives the Tower, and Woodstock, and a warrant that will not close, and comes at last to a coronation and to forty-four years of a reign built over a locked room. She goes to her grave believing that God preserved her, and never learns what was paid for it, one spring morning, by a woman with a day to live.

She said she wanted her to live.