I go to her side to pull her train a little straighter, to show off the beautiful brocade, and I whisper in her ear: “You’re not posing as an icon, you know. You can smile,” and am rewarded by her swift fugitive giggle.

“I do know,” she says. “It’s just that people will see this portrait years from now, perhaps hundreds of years from now.”

Princess Elizabeth, blooming under the attention of the painter, is as pink as the inside of a little shell. She spent so long hidden from sight that she loves the male gaze.

I sit and watch the two girls as they stand at a distance but half facing each other. The painter has his sketches of their faces, and a careful note of the colors of their gowns. All of this will be transferred to the great work like a tisserand weaving flowers on a tapestry on the loom from pictures that she has sketched in the garden.

Then the painter turns to me. “Your Majesty?”

“I am not in my gown,” I protest.

“For today, I just want to capture your likeness,” he says. “The way that you hold yourself. Will you be so good as to sit as you will be seated? Perhaps you can imagine that the king is on your right. Would you tilt your head towards him? But I need you to look straight at me.”

I sit as he directs, but I cannot lean towards the space where the king would be. The painter, de Vent, is very exact. Gently he moves the angle of my head this way and that until Mary laughingly takes the place where her father will be positioned, and I sit beside her and tip my head just slightly, as if I am listening.

“Exquisite, yes,” de Vent says. “But it is too flat. The new fashions... Your Majesty, would you allow me?”

He come closer and turns my chair a little towards where the king will sit. “And will you let your eyes go this way?” He points to the window. “So.”

He steps back to gaze at me. I look where he directs, and in my line of sight, outside the window, a blackbird lands on a branch of a tree and opens its yellow beak in a trill of song. At once I am transported to that spring when I ran through the palace to Thomas’s rooms and heard a blackbird, drunk with joy and confused by torches, singing at night like a nightingale.

“Mon Dieu!” I hear de Vent whisper, and I am recalled to the present.

“What is it?”

“Your Majesty, if I could capture that light in your eyes and that beauty in your face I would be the greatest painter in the world. You are illuminated.”

I shake my head. “I was daydreaming. It was nothing.”