Escorting the nine-day queen Lady Jane Grey across the Tower of London from throne room into imprisonment is Elizabeth Tilney, who surprised even herself by volunteering for the job. All Elizabeth knows is that it won't be for long: everyone knows that Jane will go free as soon as the victorious new queen is crowned. Which is a good thing because the two sixteen-year-old girls, cooped up together in a room in the Gentleman Gaoler's house, couldn't be less compatible. Protestant Jane is an icily self-composed idealist, and Catholic Elizabeth is anything but. They are united, though, by their disdain for the seventeen-year-old boy to whom Jane has recently been married: petulant, noisily aggrieved Guildford Dudley.

Elizabeth Tilney volunteers to escort and remain with Lady Jane Grey, who was Queen of England for nine days, to the Tower of London, through the increasingly unstable end of 1553, and has her loyalties severely tested.