The piece of jewelry was nothing special; especially to a woman like herself. The milky white pearls wrapped around her thin fingers were of average craftsmanship at best. Too thin, she thought now, her long fingers were deathly thin. Such things were to be expected, she supposed. She was sixty-nine today, and having fit as much life into those years as any woman could, she felt old. Looking through the glass towards where she would have seen the forest begin if not for the impenetrable dark, she wondered if this necklace had graced the neck of its owner as she observed from this spot the very same night from the unchanged window. Judging from the small width of the chain it had been a slender neck, as the holder's had been in youth. Twas a small consolation that she could stand with the necklace in hand in the same spot she may have. The woman wouldn't complain of it; she would take whatever clues she could get about her mother. The papers she had spent her life devouring said these chambers had once been hers, but who remembered those times now? When Elizabeth herself didn't? No, none would ever connect the Queen's choice of rooms with the doomed woman who had valued this trinket so much.
In times past when the Queen was in such a mood she'd call for one of her small group of confidants; but she had to admit that there was no one left. She was alone. Stroking the intricate B that hung from the biggest pearl, she thought how its owner must have felt the same. Alone in the drafty tower, had her mother known this soul-gripping loneliness? But her mother had never grown old. Hers would have been a different loneliness, one of betrayal. It seemed so important to find these things out; to know ever detail there was to know about the women who had died some sixty plus years ago, before Elizabeth joined her in eternal paradise. And she would be joining her soon. Creeping away from the chilly windowsill, feeling the protest of her overused bones, Elizabeth was painfully aware that there wouldn't be another year. She would be sixty-nine for the rest of her life.
Muffled laughter sounded from outside the small chamber, dying away into reverently whispered words. She smiled, while hoping they didn't decide to try this room for there midnight rendezvous. The couple must have moved on, missing the tiny anteroom their Queen stood in. The memory of being so passionately in love and lust was just a pang of sadness now. How she and Robin had fit! That memory hurt worst than even the vision of her mother broken and betrayed in the Tower. Her Robin.
How they had laughed at her! None had understood how she could have loved the son of generations of traitors, practically a commoner, a glorified stable boy. When he had married Amy they mocked her; when she died they blamed her. And that was why, wasn't it? The true reason why she could never had married him. His blood, his arrogance, none of that would have mattered if they hadn't thought her a murderess. She could not stand it, to be like her father in other's eyes, to decimate all in the way of the object of want d'jour. Of course, that wasn't what it had been. Even now, slumped in a too-stiff settee, the love for her dead Earl of Leicester burned, only now it singed her heart in ways it never could before. Elizabeth laid her aching head against the wood paneled wall.
The necklace slipped from her hand, behind the seat. She jumped up in alarm to immediately search for it. The thread of pearls hung from a golden whorl of the seat's frame. Impatient, she snatched it, snapping the old, cheap string. The pearls bounced everywhere, only the silver B stayed twisted in the cord caught on the seat. The Queen, in trying to gather the remnants of the most precious thing, found herself wracked with a burst of coughing. As she fought with the sudden fit, she watched as the white beads rolled out over the threadbare carpet. The only piece of her mother gone. The Queen could call a servant; have it brought to her jeweler to repair. The fit subsided, but she stayed still. A strange notion came to her; it was no longer important. The trinket was just that, a cheap thing. It would not bring her any closer to the long dead women who had loved it so no more than Elizabeth's wardrobe would bring others closer to her when she was no more.
The Queen stood with more energy than she had felt in a long while. As she walked to the door she swept the obvious pearls under the settee. She had the present to attend with. She would know plenty about Anne soon enough.