I felt my hand tremble at his touch, the touch of a Spanish lord on my Spanish skin. I expected him to know me at once, to know that I understood every word he said, that my reply in Spanish was readier on my tongue than my English.

“I am not sick,” I said in English, speaking very quietly and hoping that no one would hear the vestiges of my accent. “I was startled by the prince.”

“You startled her only,” he laughed, turning to the prince and speaking in Spanish. “God grant that you may startle her mistress.”

The prince nodded, indifferent to me, as a servant beneath his notice, and walked on.

“She’s more likely to startle him,” someone remarked quietly from the back. “God save us, how are we to put our prince to bed with such an aged dame?”

“And a virgin,” someone else replied. “Not even a warm and willing widow who knows what she’s been missing. This queen will freeze our lord, he’ll wilt at her bedside.”

“And she’s so dull,” the first one persisted.

The prince heard that, he halted and looked back at his retinue. “Enough,” he said clearly, speaking in Spanish, thinking that only they would understand. “It is done. I have wedded her, and I shall bed her, and if you hear that I cannot do it you can speculate then as to the cause. In the meantime let us have peace. It is not fair dealing to the English to come into the country and insult their queen.”

“They don’t deal fair to us…” someone started.

“A country of idiots…”

“Poor and bad-tempered…”

“And grasping!”

“Enough,” he said.

I followed them down the gallery to the steps leading to the great chamber. I followed them as if drawn on a chain, I could not have parted from them if my life had depended on it. I was back with my own people, hearing them speak, even though every word they said was a slander against the only woman who had been kind to me, or against England, my second home.


It was Will Somers who caught me out of my trance. He took me by the arm as I was about to follow the Spaniards into the great hall and gave me a little shake. “How now, maid? In a dream?”

“Will,” I said and grabbed on to his sleeve as if to steady myself. “Oh, Will!”

“There,” he said, gently patting me on the back as if I were an over-wrought pageboy. “Silly little maid.”

“Will, the Spanish…”

He drew me away from the main doors and put a warm arm around my shoulder.

“Take care, little fool,” he warned me. “The very walls of Winchester have ears and you never know who you are offending.”

“They’re so…” I could not find the words. “They’re so… handsome!” I burst out.

He laughed aloud, released me and clapped his hands. “Handsome, is it? You, besotted with the senors just like Her Grace, God bless her?”

“It’s their…” I paused again. “It’s their perfume,” I said simply. “They smell so wonderful.”

“Oh little maid, it is time you were wed,” he said in mock seriousness. “If you are running after men and sniffing at their spoor like a little bitch on the hunt then one day you will make your kill and you’ll be a holy fool no longer.”

He paused for a moment, measuring me. “Ah, I had forgot. You were from Spain, weren’t you?”

I nodded. There was no point in fooling a fool.

“They make you think of your home,” he predicted. “Is that it?”

I nodded.

“Ah well,” he said. “This is a better day for you than for those Englishmen who have spent their lives hating the Spanish. You will have a Spanish master once more. For the rest of us, it’s like the end of the world.”

He drew me a little closer. “And how is the Princess Elizabeth?” he asked softly.

“Angry,” I said. “Anxious. She was ill in June, you’ll have heard that she wanted the queen’s physicians, and grieved when they did not come.”

“God keep her,” he said. “Who’d have thought that she would be there this day, and that we would be here? Who’d have thought that this day would come?”

“Tell me news in return,” I started.

“Lord Robert?”

I nodded.

“Still imprisoned, and there’s no one to speak for him at court, and no one to listen anyway.”

There was a blast of trumpets, the queen and the prince had entered the hall and taken their seats.

“Time to go,” Will said. He adopted a broad smile and exaggerated his usual gangling gait. “You will be amazed, child, I have learned to juggle.”

“Do you do it well?” I asked, trotting to keep up with him as he strode toward the great open doors. “Skillfully?”

“Very badly indeed,” he said with quiet pleasure. “Very comical.”

There was a roar as he entered the room and I fell back to let him go on.

“You’d not understand being a mere lass,” he said over his shoulder. “All women laugh very meanly.”


I had not forgotten Daniel Carpenter and his letter to me for all that I had thrown it in the fire after one reading. I might as well have folded it and kept it inside my jerkin, close to my heart, for I remembered every word that he had written, as if I reread it like a lovesick girl every night.

I found that I was thinking of him more frequently since the arrival of the Spanish court. No one could have thought badly of marriage who could see the queen; from the morning that she rose from her married bed, she glowed with a warmth that no one had ever seen in her before. There was a confident serenity about her, she looked like a woman who has found a safe haven at last. She was a woman in love, she was a beloved wife, she had a councillor she could trust, a powerful man devoted to her well being. At last, after a childhood and womanhood filled with anxiety and fear, she could rest in the arms of a man who loved her. I watched her and thought that if a woman as fiercely virginal and as intensely spiritual as the queen could find love, then so perhaps could I. It might be that marriage was not the death of a woman and the end of her true self, but the unfolding of her. It might be that a woman could be a wife without having to cut the pride and the spirit out of herself. A woman might blossom into being a wife, not be trimmed down to fit. And this made me think that Daniel might be the man that I could turn to, that I could trust, Daniel, who loved me, who told me he could not sleep for thinking of me, and whose letter I had read once and then thrust into the fire, but never forgot – indeed, I could recite it word for word.

He also came to my mind for his fears and his cautions, even though I had scoffed at them at the time. Though the Spanish court drew me in like a lodestone swings north, I knew that it was my danger and my death. To be sure, Philip in England was not as he had been in Spain. Philip in England was conciliatory, anxious to bring peace, determined not to give offense to his new kingdom and not to stir up trouble about religion. But Philip nonetheless had been brought up in a land dominated equally by the rule of his father and the demands of the Inquisition. They were Philip’s father’s laws that had burned my mother at the stake and would have burned me and my father too, if they had caught us. Daniel had been right to be cautious, I even thought he had been right to take his family and my father out of the country. I could hide behind the identity of the queen’s fool, a holy child, a companion from her days in the shadows, but anyone who did not have such a provenance could expect to be examined at some time in the future. These were early days, but there were signs that the queen’s fabled mercy – so generous to those who challenged her throne – might not extend to those who insulted her faith.

I took great care to go to Mass with the queen and her ladies every day, three times a day, and I was meticulous in those little details of observation that had betrayed so many of my kin in Spain, the turning to the altar at the right moment, the bowing of the head at the raising of the Host, the careful reciting of the prayers. It was not hard for me to do. My belief in the God of my people, the God of the desert and the burning bush, the God of exiles and the oppressed, never very fervent or very strong, was deeply hidden in my heart. I did not think He was forsworn by me performing a little nodding and amening. In truth, I thought that whatever His great purpose in making my people the most miserable outcasts of Christendom, He would forgive the bobbing of such a very unimportant head.

But the attention of the court to such matters made me grateful to Daniel for his caution. In the end, I thought I should write to him, and to my father, and send the letter by some of the many soldiers who were going to Calais to refortify the town against the French, now doubly our enemy since we had a Spanish king. The letter would take some composing: if it fell into the hands of the many spies, English, French, Spanish, Venetian, or even Swedish, it would have to pass as an innocent letter from a lass to her lover. I would have to trust him to read between the lines.


Dear Daniel,


I did not reply to you earlier because I did not know what to say, besides I have been with the princess at Woodstock and could not have got a letter to you. I am now with the queen at Winchester and we will soon go to London when I can send you this letter.


I am very glad that your business took you to Calais, and I propose to join you and my father when matters change here for me, just as we agreed. I think you judged very rightly when you should leave and I am very ready to join you in good time.


I read your letter very carefully, Daniel, and I think of you often. To answer you with honesty, I am not eager for marriage as yet, but when you speak to me as you did in your letter, and when you kissed me on parting I felt, not a moment of fear or repulsion, but a delight that I cannot name, not from an affected modesty, but because I do not know the name. You did not frighten me, Daniel, I liked your kiss. I would have you as my husband, Daniel, when I am released from court, when the time is right and we are both equally ready. I cannot help be a little apprehensive at the thought of becoming a bride, but having seen the queen’s happiness in her marriage it makes me look forward to mine. I accept your proposal that we should be betrothed but I need to see my way clear to marriage.