I have agreed not to look at Master Holbein’s painting and so I do not look. One thing is true of me: if I give my word on something I keep it, although I am only a girl. Instead, I look out of the window, into the courtyard of our castle. The hunting horns sound in the forest outside, the great barred gate swings open, the huntsmen come in, my brother at their head. He glances up to the window and sees me before I can duck back. At once I know that I have irritated him. He will feel that I should not be at the window, where I can be seen by anyone in the castle yard. Although I moved too fast for him to see me in any detail, I feel certain that he knows that I am tightly laced and that the square neckline of my gown is low cut, though a muslin neckpiece covers me to my very chin. I flinch from the scowl that he shoots up to the window. Now he is displeased with me, but he will not say so. He will not complain of the gown that I could explain, he will complain of something else, but I cannot yet know what it will be. All I can be sure of is that sometime today or tomorrow, my mother will call me to her room, and he will be standing behind her chair, or turned away, or just entering the door, as if it were nothing to do with him at all, as if he were quite indifferent, and she will say to me, in tones of deep disapproval: ‘Anne, I hear that you have . . .’ and it will be something which happened days ago, which I have quite forgotten, but which he will have known and saved up until now, so that I am in the wrong, and perhaps even punished, and he will not say a word about seeing me, sitting in the window, looking pretty, which is my real offence against him.

When I was a little girl, my father used to call me his falke, his white falcon, his gyrfalcon, a hunting bird of the cold northern snows. When he saw me at my books or at my sewing he would laugh and say, ‘Oh, my little falcon, mewed up? Come away and I shall set you free!’ and not even my mother could stop me running from the school room to be with him.

I wish now, I so wish now, that he could call me away again.

I know that my mother thinks that I am a foolish girl, and my brother thinks worse; but if I were Queen of England the king could trust me with my position, I would not break into French fashions or Italian dances. They could trust me, the king could trust his honour to me. I know how important is a man’s honour, and I have no desire to be anything but a good girl, a good queen. But I also believe that however strict the King of England, I would be allowed to sit in the window of my own castle. Whatever they say of Henry of England, I think he would tell me honestly if I offended him, and not order my mother to beat me for something else.