The Prince's Secret (The Royal Biography Cozy Mystery Series Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

which is beautiful, with all kinds of tastefully up-lit ferns placed around the room. I pick out the scrawniest, healthiest salad on the menu and leave with my stomach growling even louder than before. Then it’s back out into the means streets of London in search of the elusive evening gown in size 14.
    Well, if I’m being truthful, I may need a size 16, but only if I want to be able to breathe.
     
    *****
    Am I reading this correctly? I ask myself several hours later, after returning home from London. I take off my glasses and rub my eyes. Schnipps has sent the next few pages of Mary Beaton’s confessional.
    I, Mary Beaton, do on this day, the first of February 1589, declare that when I was 15, I became the mistress of Lord Bothwell. I was forever faithful to him, and did undertake campaigns against my own Mistress due to my undying love for my dear Jamie.
    When I type “Mary Beaton” into Google, it confirms that she was one of the four little girls named Mary (hence the term “the four Marys”) who accompanied the young Queen of Scots across the channel to France for the Queen’s betrothal to Francis II. 
    I read on. Schnipps has sent me the next 15 pages with a request that I send him a translation as soon as possible. The pages begin with Mary Beaton describing how she met the dastardly James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, and how they maintained a relationship off and on until the time of his marriage to Queen Mary. Several times she pauses her narrative to describe how her love for Bothwell caused her to carry out an outrageous act against her mistress. But she does not go into detail about what exactly this act was, at least not in the pages I’ve read so far.
    Mary Beaton’s undying love for James Hepburn causes me to scratch my head. I find it hard to believe that anyone could love the Earl of Bothwell, who seemed incapable of maintaining any sort of upstanding, monogamous relationship. I know I shouldn’t judge him by modern standards, but I do. Bothwell had wives and mistresses tucked away all over different corners of Europe.
    “Oh, Mary, you should have had more sense,” I sigh as I read her enthusiastic description of Bothwell’s charms. My reading is interrupted when an instant message blips across my screen.
    <> Schnipps asks, even though it is well past midnight.
    <>
    <> Schnipps replies.
    Perhaps I like Schnipps more because he called Bothwell a scoundrel. James Hepburn was most likely a murderer, an adulterer, and a rapist. If Mary, Queen of Scots had one downfall, it was her taste in men. In the same chamber where the Prince and I found this book, Mary’s second husband, Lord Darnley and his henchmen brutally killed Mary’s secretary, David Rizzio. Lord Darnley was jealous of Rizzio, accusing him of being Mary’s lover. Most historians don’t believe there really was anything between Mary and Rizzio, yet a part of me hopes, for Mary’s sake, that Rizzio was her paramour; she obtained so little satisfaction from the other men in her life.
    In my exhausted state, I picture Mary on some modern talk show with some famous shrink, and I can hear the audience telling her to kick the murderer Lord Darnley to the curb. Of course, a modern day audience would also be shouting for justice for Rizzio. Unfortunately there wasn’t any. 16th century Scotland was not about to imprison a Lord for a crime of passion. Especially not a Lord who had a claim of his own to the English throne. Lord Darnley went on, living his life as if nothing had happened, as if he weren’t married to a woman who despised him. A woman who may very well have conspired with another man to be rid of him. And the man she conspired with was James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Mary and Bothwell may have resorted to murder. On Feb 9th, 1567, someone blew up Darnley’s residence. The culprits placed barrels of gun powder under the room in which he was