England is a business, an estate like any other. We have to be able to plan ahead. We have to know who will inherit and what he will get; we have to foresee what he will do with his inheritance. We have to see our next master and know what his plans will be. We have to know whether he will be Lutheran or Papist. Those of us living in rebuilt abbeys and dining off church silver are especially anxious to know this. Please God this time she settles on this suitor, marries him, and gives us a new steady Protestant master for the trade of England.

Elizabeth is a hard mistress to serve, I think, as I command the carpenters to mend the gaps in the floorboards. This would have been our first Christmas at court, for me and my lord the earl. Our first Christmas as newlyweds, the first Christmas I would have been a countess at court, where I should have sparkled like a snowflake and taken great joy in settling old scores from my newly raised position. But instead, the queen allowed my husband the earl only a couple of days with me before dispatching him to Bolton Castle to fetch the Scots queen while I set to work on this hovel.

The more I repair this half-ruined wreck of a house, the more ashamed of it I am, though God knows it is no fault of mine. No house of mine would ever fall into disrepair like this. All of my properties—most of which came to me through the good management of my second husband, William Cavendish—were renovated and rebuilt as soon as we acquired them. We never bought anything without improving it. Cavendish prided himself on parceling together plots of land and swapping one farm for another till he made a handsome estate, which I would then run at a profit. He was a careful man, a great businessman, an older man, over forty when he married me, his bride of nineteen.

He taught me how to keep an accounts book for our household and make it up every week, as faithfully as reading a sermon on Sunday. When I was little more than a girl, I used to bring my household book to him like a child with her schoolwork, and he would go through it with me on a Sunday evening, as if we were saying our prayers together, like a pious father and daughter, our heads side by side over the book, our voices murmuring the numbers.