“Don’t you start,” I said, flushing. “Or I’ll begin pointing out palace girls to the king.”

That sobered him up. “Do you think His Majesty was serious about finding me a wife?”

“No,” I said, laughing. “Would it be so bad, though? I mean, you do want to get married someday.”

“Of course. But not to a court lady.”

“Why not?”

“Sally told you how mean they were to her in Paris. Besides, I don’t have any place in all that finery. I just want a simple life. With a kind girl, who’ll make a kind home.” He was silent for a moment. “I do think the king was right about you, though. You should marry Sally.”

“Enough already.”

“I mean it.”

To my surprise, he really did.

“Look,” Tom said, “everything His Majesty said about her was true. You’d be good together. Plus, she’s got the most important quality of all.”

“What’s that?”

“I like her,” he said. “You are absolutely forbidden from marrying a girl I don’t like.”

“Ha! That goes for you, too, you know.”

“Naturally.”

“I still think you should ask the king to introduce you to some court ladies. If you don’t want to marry them, just say no.”

Suddenly Tom looked very sad. “It’s not easy to say no to a king.”

I paused. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” he said.

He snapped the reins and rode ahead in silence.

I rode behind him for a while. I thought back to when I’d seen him exiting Lord Ashcombe’s office. Why had he been in there? What were they talking about?

It occurred to me that other than the pension—and even now, I could barely believe it; a pension, it was absolutely mad—Sally and I both got additional gifts. She got to be the king’s ward; I got a new master. Surely Tom deserved his own gift, too? Besides his new, beloved hat?

Had Lord Ashcombe offered him something?

And what sort of gift would make Tom sad?

I sighed. He obviously didn’t want to tell me, so I just worked to cheer him up. Today, that wasn’t hard to do. Apart from the fact that Tom also loved his new horse, the path to Berkshire House took us around Saint James’s Park.

The green, originally a deer-hunting ground preserved for Henry VIII, had been altered by Charles to make it even more grand. Surrounded by grass and trees was a canal, forty yards wide and nearly half a mile long, upon which all sorts of waterfowl made their home. Including a bunch of white, long-necked, giant-beaked birds.

I pointed them out to Tom as we rode. “Look.”

He stared, amazed. “What are those?”

“Pelicans,” I said. They’d been a gift to the king from a visiting ambassador a couple of years back; I couldn’t remember from where. Master Benedict had brought me to the park that summer to see them.

Look at me now, I said in my heart. On a horse, apprenticed to a spymaster, in service to the king. Not exactly the life I’d planned.