Carr looked at her with great seriousness. I believe I witnessed the very moment in which they fell in love. In that exchange of looks, they understood that no one else at Court was as well suited as they were to each other. This handsome foreigner, not brought up in the English Court, was less trammeled by its ornate hierarchies and stifling conventions. Although Overbury claimed him for the Essex camp, Carr belonged to no faction, only to the King. He did not need Frankie to access the power wielded by her relations. He could love her for herself. Frankie blushed and raised her fan.

I turned to the ring, despairing the lack of discretion in either party. A cage was opened to the side of the pit but no lion appeared, causing the King to mutter with frustration. Carr leaned in to his master, talking intimately, and the King ran his nail absent-mindedly up and down the lacing on the young man’s chest. Then suddenly he bellowed into the yard, causing us all to jump.

“Enough waiting!”

The bear raised its great head and stared at the King. Shouting could be heard in the cages and an enormous lion bolted into the pit, followed by a keeper wielding a flaming torch, but it slunk away to the perimeter of the yard. The King swore long and loud.

“Bring the dogs!” he shouted.

The lion was shooed back into its cage and a man wearing leather arm protectors and a metal gorget was pulled into the yard by four mastiffs, strands of saliva swinging from their bulging jaws. Six men carrying long, leather-tipped staves followed. The bear retreated as far as its chain allowed.

The courtiers around me screamed. Even Frankie yelled at the bear to fight, but I only prayed for the quick deliverance of all the creatures in the pit. I had never found the suffering of others, even animals, entertaining. I would not watch hangings; I stopped up my ears to the calamities befalling others read out by news criers. There was enough over which to weep without going in search of more.

The first dog leaped at the bear’s face but was batted away. The men sprinted to break its fall with their staves then laid it, bleeding, on the sand. The second dog sank its teeth into the bear’s hind paw, putting it off its stroke and allowing the third dog to clamp itself to the beast’s nose. The great creature let out a howl.