To my delight one day, a dark-skinned lascar sailor with a silver ring in his ear and his face tattooed, more like a painted devil than a man, comes to my presence chamber with a huge bird, as blue as indigo and as big as a buzzard, sitting on his clenched fist. He sells it to me for a ridiculously high price and now I am the very proud owner of a parrot with black knowing eyes. I name him Don Pepe, since he speaks nothing but the most obscene Spanish. I will have to put a cover over his cage when the Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, comes to pay his respects, but Nan assures me that he’s a hard man to shock: after years at the court he has heard far worse.

The king gives me a new horse for riding, a beautiful bay mare, and a puppy, an adorable spaniel with a shining tan coat. I take him with me everywhere and he sits at my feet even when I go to chapel in the morning. I’ve never owned a dog that was not a working dog before, only the hounds for hunting in the stables at Snape, or the sheepdogs with their quick dashes here and there.

“You are the most idle thing,” I tell him. “How can you live with yourself when all you have to be is ornamental?”

“He’s very sweet,” Nan agrees.

“Purkoy was a darling,” Catherine Brandon remarks.

“Oh, what was Purkoy?” I ask.

“Anne Boleyn’s dog.” Nan frowns at Catherine. “Nothing like little Rig, here.”

“Is there anything new?” I ask irritably. “Is there anything that I do that one of them hasn’t already done?”

Catherine looks embarrassed.

“Your clocks,” Nan says with a small smile at me. “You’re the first queen to love clocks. All the goldsmiths and clockmakers in London are in heaven.”

* * *

The court is to go on progress, as it does every summer. I cannot imagine how we are to pack up everything and move, every week, sometimes after only a few days, from one house to another, where all our servants will be expected to unload furniture, tapestries, and silverware and make a court in a new house. How am I to know what clothes to pack? How am I to know what jewels I should take? I don’t even know how they take enough linen for the beds.

“It’s nothing for you to trouble yourself about,” Nan says. “Really, nothing. All the servants have moved the queen’s household a score of times, a hundred times. All you have to do is to ride beside the king and look happy.”

“But all the bedding! And all the clothes!” I exclaim.

“Everyone knows their part,” she repeats. “You need do nothing but go where you are sent.”

“My birds?”

“The falconers will take care of them. They’ll go in their own cart behind the falcons and hawks.”

“My jewels?” I ask.