I thought I would see the prince clearly at the wedding feast but as I was hurrying on my way to the hall, I heard the rattle of the weapons of the Spanish guard and I stepped back into a window embrasure as the men at arms marched down and then came the bustle of his court after them, the prince himself at the center. And then, amid all this hustle of excitement, something happened to me. It was caused by the flurry of silks and velvets, embroidery and diamonds, the dark full richness of the Spanish court. It was caused by the scent of the pomade they wore on their hair and beards, and the perfumed pomander that every man had pinned with a golden buckle to his belt. It was the clink of the priceless inlaid breastplates of the soldiery, the tap of the beautifully forged swords against the stone of the walls. It was the rapid interchange of the language, which was like the coo in a dovecote of home to me who had been a stranger in a strange land for so very long. I smelled the Spaniards and saw them and heard them and sensed them in a way that I had never apprehended anything before, and I stumbled back, feeling for the cold wall behind me to steady me, almost fainting, overwhelmed with a homesickness and a longing for Spain that was so strong that it was almost like a gripe in my belly. I think I even cried out, and one man heard me, one man turned dark familiar eyes and looked toward me.

“What is it, lad?” he asked, seeing my golden pageboy suit.

“It’s the queen’s holy fool,” one of his men remarked in Spanish. “Some toy that she affects. A boy-girl, a hermaphrodite.”

“Good God, a wizened old maid served by no maid at all,” someone quipped, his accent Castilian. The prince said “Hush,” but absent-mindedly, as if he was not defending a new wife but reprimanding a familiar offense.

“Are you sick, child?” he asked me in Spanish.

One of his companions stepped forward and took my hand. “The prince asks are you sick?” he demanded in careful English.

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.