This is a Talbot property, belonging to my husband, inherited from his family, and I never see it without thinking how well I have married: that this palace should be one of the great houses that I may count as my home. It is a cathedral, it is an etching of stone against sky. The high arched windows are traceries of white stone, the turrets ethereal against the evening sky, the woods like billowing clouds of fresh green below it, and the rooks are cawing and settling for the night as we ride up the muddy track towards the house and they throw open the great gates.

I had sent half my household ahead of us to prepare, so that when the queen and my husband the earl rode in together, hours earlier, they arrived in afternoon sunshine and to a band of musicians. When they entered the great hall there were two huge fires either end of the room to warm them, and the servants and the tenantry lined up, bowing. By the time I arrive, at dusk, with the rest of the household furniture, the valuables, and the portraits, gold vessels, and other treasures, they are already at dinner. I go in to find them seated in the great hall, just the two of them at the high table, she in my husband’s place, her cloth of estate over her throne, thirty-two dishes before her, my husband seated on an inferior chair just below her, serving her from a great silver tureen, collected from an abbey, with the abbot’s own golden ladle.

They do not even see me when I enter at the back of the hall, and I am about to join them, when something makes me hesitate. The dirt from the road is in my hair and on my face, my clothes are damp, I am muddy from my boots to my knees, and I smell of horse sweat. I hesitate, and when my husband the earl looks up from his dinner I wave and point towards the great stairs to our bedchamber, as if I am not hungry.