There was dancing after dinner but she did not rise from her seat, though she tapped her foot and seemed to enjoy the music. Will made her laugh a couple of times, and she smiled on him as if he were a familiar face in a dangerous world. She had known him when he was her father’s fool and given her brother carry-backs, and sung nonsense songs at her and sworn it was Spanish. When she looked around the court now at the hard faces of the men who had seen her insulted and humiliated by her own baby brother it must have been a small relief to know that Will Somers at least never changed in his unswerving good humour.

She did not drink deeply, and she ate very little; she was not a famous glutton as her father had been. I looked her over, as did the court: this woman who might be my next mistress. She was a woman in her thirty-seventh year, but she still had the pretty colouring of a girl: pale skin and cheeks which readily flushed rosy pink. She wore her hood set back off her square honest face and showed her hair, dark brown with a tinge of Tudor red. Her smile was her great charm; it came slowly, and her eyes were warm. But what struck me most about her was her air of honesty. She did not look at all like my idea of a princess—having spent a few weeks at court I thought everyone there smiled with hard eyes and said one thing and meant the opposite. But this princess looked as if she said nothing that she did not mean, as if she longed to believe that others were honest too, that she wanted to ride a straight road.

She had a grim little face in repose, but it was all redeemed by that smile: the smile of the best-beloved princess, the first of her father’s children, born when he was a young man who still adored his wife. She had quick dark eyes, Spanish eyes, from her mother and her rapid appreciation of everything around her. She held herself upright in her chair, the dark collar of her gown framing her shoulders and neck. She had a great jewelled cross at her throat as if to flaunt her religion in this most Protestant court, and I thought that she must be either very brave or very reckless to insist on her faith when her brother’s men were burning heretics for less. But then I saw the tremor in her hand when she reached for her golden goblet and I imagined that like many women she had learned to put on a braver face than she might feel.

When there was a break in the dancing, Robert Dudley was at her side, whispering to her, and she glanced over to me and he beckoned me forward.

‘I hear you are from Spain, and my brother’s new fool,’ she said in English.