A fifteen year old boy died at Greenwich on the sixth of July 1553. His death put three women on a collision course none of them had chosen. Two would soon become queens. The third would watch and wait.
Katherine Grey was twenty years old, eight months pregnant, and standing outside Robert Dudley's bedroom in the middle of the night asking him to help her. She had a secret husband, a missing marriage certificate, and a cousin on the throne who would never forgive her for any of it. She had done nothing except fall in love at the wrong time and with the wrong man. She was trapped in the wrong body. It was a body that carried royal blood she had never asked for and could not give back.
Her daughter was queen for nine days and beheaded at sixteen or seventeen. Frances Brandon attended to the consequences, settled the estate, and remarried within months. She lived for another decade. History has never quite known what to do with her. Neither, probably, did she.
She was queen for nine days. She had not asked to be. On the morning of her execution she was blindfolded and could not find the block. She said quietly, where is it, where is it, and someone guided her hands to it. She was sixteen or seventeen years old. She had spent the nine days writing letters asking to be allowed to go home.