Then there is general dancing and my mother orders me to partner him. Everyone remarks how well we look together even though he is a full head taller than I am. I am very small and pale; none of us Grey girls are big-boned; but I am glad to be dainty, and not a stout thing like Princess Elizabeth.

“You dance beautifully,” Ned says to me, as we come together and wait for another couple to finish their part. “Do you know why my father and I are here?”

The movement of the dance separates us and gives me time to think of a dignified reply.

“No, do you?” is all I manage.

He takes my hands as we progress down the line of other dancers. We stand and make an arch with our hands and he smiles at me as the others duck their heads and wind their way through. “They want us to marry,” he says cheerfully. “It’s agreed. We are to be husband and wife.”

We have to stand opposite each other while another pair of dancers makes their way down the set, so he can see my response to this news from him. I feel my cheeks grow warm, and I try not to beam like an eager idiot. “It is my father who should tell me, not you,” I say stiffly.

“Shall you be pleased when he does?”

I look down so he can’t see what I am thinking. I don’t want my brown eyes to shine like his. “I am bound by the Word of God to obey my father,” I say.

“Shall you be pleased to obey him and marry me?”

“Quite.”

* * *

My parents obviously believe that I should be the last person to be consulted, for I am not summoned to my mother’s rooms until the next day, when Edward and his father are preparing to leave and the horses are actually standing at the open front door, the scent of the English spring blowing into the house with the ecstatic singing of courting birds.

I can hear the servants taking out the saddlebags in the hall below as I kneel to my parents, and my mother nods to the servant to shut the door.

“You’re to marry Edward Seymour,” my mother says briskly. “Promised; but not betrothed in writing. First, we need to see if his father can get himself back on the council and work with John Dudley. Dudley is the man now. We have to see that Seymour will work with him and rise again.”

“Unless there is any chance of the other matter...” my father says, looking at my mother with meaning.

“No, he’s certain to marry a princess from abroad,” my mother says.