Mary, the smallest maid-in-waiting in the world, moves with me as if we were dancing partners. We look so pretty together that nobody remarks that she is tiny compared with everyone else. They laugh at her and pet her, and they tell my mother that she must feed her game and roast meats to make her grow. Nobody thinks that there might be anything wrong with her, and my mother says nothing. With her finest daughter lost to her, she’s not going to undervalue the two that she has left. I see Mary eyeing the court dwarf, Thomasina, sometimes, as a bad-tempered kitten will challenge a small cat. Thomasina, who is fully grown at less than four feet, and excessively proud, ignores Mary completely.

When I first meet the Herberts, father and son, it is as if we are strangers. My marriage is annulled as if it had never been, and neither of them says one word to me. The Earl of Pembroke bows as if he cannot quite recall me; his son Henry inclines his head with faint regret. I ignore them both.

I don’t care for them, I don’t care for anything at court. I have become a young lady of the royal house again. I am restored. I can hardly believe that I ever had a sister Jane at all, for no one ever mentions her. I had no father, I had no sister Jane. Little Mary and I are Queen Mary’s loyal maids-in-waiting, and my mother accompanies her everywhere as her favored cousin and senior lady at court. I have my own rooms in the queen’s apartments, while Mary sleeps in the maids’ rooms with the other girls. We are acknowledged as the queen’s cousins and we make new friends and companions.

I meet Janey Seymour, who is sister to Ned Seymour, the handsome boy who came to be betrothed to Jane all that long time ago. I like Janey at once. She is a clever girl, a scholar like Jane; she even writes poetry that rhymes and yet she is playful and funny. She strikes me at once as an ideal friend: she is pretty like me and learned like Jane. She hoped to be Jane’s sister-in-law, she is the only person at court who speaks of her. We have shared a loss, and now we can be friends.

The two of us agree on everything, silently disapproving when the queen accepts a proposal of marriage from a man eleven years her junior and a thousand times better-looking, the dazzlingly handsome Prince Philip of Spain, who comes to England with a court of darkly delicious friends and proceeds to make all us girls quite giddy with desire, frantic to be admired.