We go painfully slow. My husband the earl and the queen can canter on the grassy verges, and he knows the bridleways and shortcuts through woods and leads her splashing through streams. They will have a pleasant journey through the country with half a dozen companions. They will gallop on the high moors and then drop down to the shaded paths beside the rivers where the trees make an avenue of green. But I, fretting about the wagons and the household goods, have to go as slowly as the heaviest cart can lumber along the muddy lanes. When we lose a wheel, we all halt for several hours in the rain to make repairs; when a horse goes lame, we have to stop and take it from the shafts, and hire another at the next village. It is hard labor and I might begrudge it if I had been born and raised as a lady. But I was not born a lady; I was born and raised as a working woman and I still take great joy in doing hard work, and doing it well. I don’t pretend to be a lady of leisure. I have worked for my fortune and I take a pride in it. I am the first woman in my family to rise from poverty by my own efforts; actually I am the first woman in Derbyshire to own great property in my own right. I am the first woman that I know to use my own judgment to make and keep a fortune. This is why I love the England of Elizabeth: because a woman like me, born as low as me, can make and keep my own fortune.

The last few miles of the journey to Wingfield follow the course of the river. It is evening by the time we get there and at least the rain has lifted. I am wet through, but at any rate I can put back my hood and look around me at the most beautiful approach to my lord’s favorite house. We ride along the floor of the valley, with moorhen scuttering away into the water of the river and lapwing calling in the evening sky, then we round the corner and see, across the water meadows, the beautiful palace of Wingfield, rising above the trees, like a heavenly kingdom. The marshes lie beneath it with mist coiling off the waters; I can hear the croaking of frogs and the booming of the bittern. Above the water is a thick belt of trees, the ash coming green at last, the willows whispering in thick clumps. A throstle thrush sings, its warble sharp against the dusk, and there is a whisper of white like a ghost as a barn owl sweeps past us.