Later

After midnight. We fell to the food on the banquet table like ravenous wolves, after fasting all day. Mary Fleming nearly fainted when we walked in procession through the chapel with our lighted candles. That is the custom. This is the part of Candlemas Day I love the most. I wore a dress embroidered all over with silver and pink and violet threads and tiny pearls formed into roses and jasmine and marguerites. To wear the dress was like walking in a garden. On my ears were the double-drop pearl and diamond earrings given to me by my grandmother de Guise. My coif was a masterpiece of whitework embroidery – white linen thread on a white background. I did not want it to glint or shimmer or be studded with jewels. I felt that my headdress should appear humble and most simple, for if the Virgin Mary does look down on me she should not be blinded by the flash of jewels. I come to her humbly with the light of my taper and a bowed head. Queen Catherine and several other women of the court wore their usual court makeup. Some of the Marys tried the whitening pastes for the first time for the banquet afterward, but I came in my own skin and the tint of my own blood and the scroll of the faint blue vein that runs near my temple.