I hesitated. ‘If you will allow it, Your Grace, I would rather go on dressed as a pageboy.’

She looked at me curiously. ‘Don’t you long for a pretty gown, and to grow your hair, child? Don’t you want to be a young woman? I thought I would give you a gown for Christmas.’

I thought of my mother plaiting my thick black hair and winding the plaits around her fingers and telling me I would become a beauty, a famously beautiful woman. I thought of her chiding me for my love of rich cloth, and how I had begged for a green velvet gown for Hanukah.

‘I lost my love of finery when I lost my mother,’ I said quietly. ‘There’s no pleasure in it for me without her to choose and fit the dresses on me, and tell me that they suit me. I don’t even want long hair without her here to plait it for me.’

Her face became tender. ‘When did she die?’

‘When I was eleven years old,’ I lied. ‘She took the plague.’ I would never risk revealing the truth that she had been burned as a heretic, not even with this queen who looked so gravely and sorrowfully into my face.

‘Poor child,’ she said gently. ‘It is a loss that you never forget. You can learn to bear it, but you never forget it.’

‘Every time something good happens to me I want to tell her. Every time something bad happens I want her help.’

She nodded. ‘I used to write to my mother, even when I knew that they would never allow me to send my letters to her. Even though there was nothing in them that they could have objected to, no secrets, just my need for her and my sorrow that she was far from me. But they would not let me write to her. I just wanted to tell her that I loved her and I missed her. And then she died and I was not allowed to go to her. I could not even hold her hand and close her eyes.’

She put her hand to her eyes and pressed her cool fingertips against her eyelids, as if to hold back old tears.

She cleared her throat. ‘But this cannot mean that you never wear a gown,’ she said lightly. ‘Life goes on, Hannah. Your mother would not want you to grieve. She would want you to grow to be a woman, a beautiful young woman. She would not want her little girl to wear boy’s clothes forever.’

‘I don’t want to be a woman,’ I said simply. ‘My father has arranged a marriage for me, but I know I am not yet ready to be a woman and a wife.’

‘You can’t want to be a virgin like me,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘It’s not a course many women would choose.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not a virgin queen like you, I have not dedicated myself to being a single woman; but it’s as if . . .’ I broke off. ‘As if I don’t know how to be a woman,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘I watch you, and I watch the ladies of the court.’ Tactfully I did not add that of them all, I watched the Lady Elizabeth, who seemed to me to be the epitome of the grace of a girl and the dignity of a princess. ‘I watch everyone, and I think I will learn it in time. But not yet.’