He drew me a little closer. ‘And how is the Princess Elizabeth?’ he asked softly.

‘Angry,’ I said. ‘Anxious. She was ill in June, you’ll have heard that she wanted the queen’s physicians, and grieved when they did not come.’

‘God keep her,’ he said. ‘Who’d have thought that she would be there this day, and that we would be here? Who’d have thought that this day would come?’

‘Tell me news in return,’ I started.

‘Lord Robert?’

I nodded.

‘Still imprisoned, and there’s no-one to speak for him at court, and no-one to listen anyway.’

There was a blast of trumpets, the queen and the prince had entered the hall and taken their seats.

‘Time to go,’ Will said. He adopted a broad smile and exaggerated his usual gangling gait. ‘You will be amazed, child, I have learned to juggle.’

‘Do you do it well?’ I asked, trotting to keep up with him as he strode towards the great open doors. ‘Skilfully?’

‘Very badly indeed,’ he said with quiet pleasure. ‘Very comical.’

There was a roar as he entered the room and I fell back to let him go on.

‘You’d not understand being a mere lass,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘All women laugh very meanly.’

* * *

I had not forgotten Daniel Carpenter and his letter to me for all that I had thrown it in the fire after one reading. I might as well have folded it and kept it inside my jerkin, close to my heart, for I remembered every word that he had written, as if I re-read it like a lovesick girl every night.

I found that I was thinking of him more frequently since the arrival of the Spanish court. No-one could have thought badly of marriage who could see the queen; from the morning that she rose from her married bed, she glowed with a warmth that no-one had ever seen in her before. There was a confident serenity about her, she looked like a woman who has found a safe haven at last. She was a woman in love, she was a beloved wife, she had a councillor she could trust, a powerful man devoted to her well being. At last, after a childhood and womanhood filled with anxiety and fear, she could rest in the arms of a man who loved her. I watched her and thought that if a woman as fiercely virginal and as intensely spiritual as the queen could find love, then so perhaps could I. It might be that marriage was not the death of a woman and the end of her true self, but the unfolding of her. It might be that a woman could be a wife without having to cut the pride and the spirit out of herself. A woman might blossom into being a wife, not be trimmed down to fit. And this made me think that Daniel might be the man that I could turn to, that I could trust, Daniel, who loved me, who told me he could not sleep for thinking of me, and whose letter I had read once and then thrust into the fire, but never forgot—indeed, I could recite it word for word.