But during this dull time of embarrassed regret, with no Prince of Wales in the cradle and little prospect of another pregnancy, I am not the only one who is thinking of my rights. I seem to have become of great interest to two people—two men, actually. One is my former husband, Henry Lord Herbert, who always turns his head and gives me a little hidden smile when we maids walk past him. I don’t smile back exactly, I give him a look a little like Jane used to put on when she read something that she thought unlikely: a sort of skeptical raised eyebrow, a sort of looking down my nose. I think it’s rather charming, and I cuff Mary, my sister, when she remarks that I am gurning at Henry Herbert as if I wished we were still married.

I say it hardly befits her, whose head comes only to the top of my bodice, to comment on my appearance. “You’re no taller than the queen’s dwarf,” I say crushingly. “Don’t tell me that I’m gurning.”

“I am no dwarf,” she says firmly. “I was born small but royal. I am quite different from Thomasina. Everyone says so.”

I can’t challenge her petite dignity. “Oh, and who are all these people who say so?”

“I do,” she says with huge dignity. “And it is me who matters.”

She has always been quite untroubled that she is so short and not growing anymore. Jane once told her that dwarfs in some heathen country were worshipped as gods, and it filled her with pride. She thinks very highly of herself for one who stands so low. I think it very odd that I should have had one sister who despised the world of the flesh, and one too tiny to desire it, and here am I, born between the two of them, tall and pretty, the most eager girl for worldly pleasures in all of the court.

“I suppose you want to marry him again,” Mary says sagely. “I would have thought that the way they treated you would have put you off the Herberts forever.”

I tell her, not at all! Not at all! We were never married, not at all! Just as she was never betrothed either. The marriage is denied and forgotten and I have no idea why he smiles so charmingly at me. He should have kept me as his wife if he likes me so much, if he had the sense to go against his family’s orders and follow his heart. But he made the mistake of letting me go, and now he sees that I am a center of attention at court, I am pleased to think he regrets it.

But the other gentleman—actually nobleman—who is taking an interest in me is even more surprising: the Spanish ambassador, Count de Feria.