I gasp. I can’t help myself. Truly, I gasp at the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life. She has a face like a painting, as an artist might draw. She has the face of an angel. She has thick black hair, cropped like a boy’s but sparkling at the front now with melting snow. She has dark arched eyebrows and eyelashes so long they sweep her cheeks. Her eyes are dark, dark and clear, and her skin is like porcelain, white and smooth without a single flaw. Her face is perfect like the carving of an angel, a serene, heartless face, but what makes her remarkable, unlike anyone I have ever seen before, is her charm. She turns a smile on me and suddenly she is luminous, like a shaft of sunlight, like a sparkle on water, she is like some beautiful thing that makes your heart lift for the mere joy of it. Like the swoop of a swallow in flight that makes you feel glad to be alive. Her smile is like that, is my first foolish thought, her smile is like the swoop of a swallow in flight in midsummer dusk. My second thought is that Queen Elizabeth will hate her like poison.

“This is a most kind welcome,” she says in French, then sees my frown as I can’t understand her, and she says in hesitant English, “You are kind, thank you.” She holds out her hands to the blaze and then she stands up. Quietly, her lady-in-waiting comes forward and unties the furs at her neck and slips off her wet cloak. She nods her thanks. “Lady Shrewsbury, may I present my ladies-in-waiting? This is Lady Mary Seton, and here is Lady Agnes Livingstone,” she says, and the women and I curtsy to each other and I nod to one of my servants to take the wet cloak away.

“May I offer you some refreshment?” I say. I left Derbyshire when I was a girl and I have studied my speech ever since, but even so my voice seems too loud, uncouth in the room. Damn it, I have lived in the greatest houses of the land. I have served Queen Elizabeth and I count Robert Dudley and William Cecil as my personal friends, but I could bite my tongue when I hear the words come out of my mouth clotted with the Derbyshire burr. I flush with embarrassment. “Would you like a glass of wine or a mulled ale against the cold?” I ask, taking extra care with my speech and sounding now stilted and false.

“Now, what do you like?” She turns to me as if she is truly interested in my tastes.

“I’d have a glass of mulled ale,” I say. “I brought it from my brew-house at Chatsworth.”