fool’s livery?’
I saw my father looking towards us. He could sense that we were far from courtship. I saw him make a little tentative move as if to interrupt us, but then he waited.
‘Shall I tell them that we cannot agree and ask you to release me from our betrothal?’ Daniel asked tightly.
Wilfully, I was about to agree, but his stillness, his silence, his patient waiting for my reply made me look at this young man, this Daniel Carpenter, more closely. The light was going from the sky and in the half-darkness I could see the man he would become. He would be handsome, he would have a dark mobile face, a quick observing eye, a sensitive mouth, a strong straight nose like mine, thick black hair like mine. And he would be a wise man, he was a wise youth, he had seen me and understood me and contradicted my very core, and yet still he stood waiting. He would give me a chance. He would be a generous husband. He would want to be kind.
‘Leave me now,’ I said feebly. ‘I can’t say now. I have said too much already. I am sorry for speaking out. I am sorry if I angered you.’
But his anger had left him as quickly as it had come, and that was another thing that I liked in him.
‘Shall I come again?’
‘All right.’
‘Are we still betrothed?’
I shrugged. There was too much riding on my answer. ‘I haven’t broken it,’ I said, finding the easiest way out. ‘It’s not broken yet.’
He nodded. ‘I shall need to know,’ he warned me. ‘If I am not to marry you, then I could marry another. I shall want to marry within two years; you, or another girl.’
‘You have so many to choose from?’ I taunted him, knowing that he had not.
‘There are many girls in London,’ he returned. ‘I could marry outside our kin, well enough.’
‘I can see them allowing that!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’ll have to marry a Jew, there’s no escape from that. They will send you a fat Parisian or a girl with skin the colour of mud from Turkey.’
‘I would try to be a good husband even to a fat Parisian or to a young girl from Turkey,’ he said steadily. ‘And it is more important to love and cherish the wife that God gives you than to run after some silly maid who does not know her own mind.’
‘Would that be me?’ I asked sharply.
I expected his colour to rise but this time he did not blush. He met my eyes frankly and it was I who looked away first. ‘I think you are a silly maid if you turn from the love and protection of a man who would be a good husband, to a life of deceit at court.’
My father came up beside Daniel before I could reply, and put a hand on his shoulder.
‘And so you two are getting acquainted,’ he said hopefully. ‘What d’you make of your wife-to-be, Daniel?’
I expected Daniel to complain of me to my father. Most young men would have been all a-prickle with their pride stinging, but he gave me a small rueful smile. ‘I think we are coming to know each other,’ he said gently. ‘We have overleaped being polite strangers and reached disagreement very quickly, don’t you think, Hannah?’
‘Commendably quick,’ I said, and was rewarded by the warmth of his smile.
Lady Mary came to London for the Candlemas feast, as had been planned; it seemed that no-one had told her that her brother was too sick to rise from his bed. She rode in through the palace gate of Whitehall with a great train behind her, and was greeted at the very threshold of the palace by the duke, with his sons, including Lord Robert, at his side, and the council of England bowing low before her. Seated high on her horse, her small determined face looking down at the sea of humbly bowing heads, I thought I saw a smile of pure amusement cross her lips before she put down her hand to be kissed.
I had heard so much about her, the beloved daughter of the king who had been put aside on the word of Anne Boleyn, the whore. The princess who had been humbled to dust, the mourning girl who had been forbidden to see her dying mother. I had expected a figure of tragedy: she had endured a life which would have broken most women; but what I saw was a stocky little fighter with enough wit about her to smile at the court, knocking their noses on their knees because, suddenly, she was the heir with formidable prospects.
The duke treated her as if she were queen already. She was helped from her horse and led in to the banquet. The king was in his chamber, coughing and retching in his little bed; but they had the banquet anyway, and I saw the Lady Mary look round at the beaming faces as if to note that when the heir was in the ascendant, a king could lie sick and alone, and no-one mind at all.
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.
I bowed low. ‘Yes, Your Grace.’
‘Speak Spanish,’ Lord Robert commanded me, and I bowed again and told her in Spanish that I was glad to be at court.
When I looked up I saw the delight in her face
