I was proud that I had played my part well. I knew I had excelled because my father told me so. We were sitting at the top table in the Great Hall while all the tenants and guests ate enormous slices of roast beef, and then (glorious moment) raised their cups to drink to my health. At that I bowed my thanks as if I were already a countess. After dispensing my stately nods to the left and right, I took a gulp of sack myself, but it was so sweet and strong, it made me feel a little sick. How could adults drink that stuff?

Within a few days, I had grown more used to the idea that I was betrothed and that no one but God could part me from my aristocratic husband. I longed for my menses to start, so that I could be a properly married lady and go to live in my husband’s house.

“When will I leave here to go and live at Westmorland, Aunt Margaret?” I asked each and every morning. “When, when, when?”

“Oh, for the love of God!” she snapped back at me. “Anyone would think you disliked your home and family.”

I pondered her words. The turrets at Stoneton were a little crumbly around the top, like a biscuit that you had carried in your pocket, and the gardens below were rather fuller of vegetables than pleasure grounds should really be. Yes, of course I loved this place, but it was so run-down and boring.

Probably once I was there at Westmorland, there’d be presents like those Sir Dudley had given me every day, and no longer would I have to attend the boring daily grind of lessons in writing or housekeeping. Probably I would wear a pink gown and a tall pointed hat with a veil floating from the top of it, like the ladies did at the court of Prince Arthur. But within a week, our guests had departed, and life mysteriously seemed to have returned to its usual placid course. It was just as if Sir Dudley had never visited and my father had never nearly cried.

Sometimes I nearly cried myself, in the grey mornings, as I woke in my same old bed to rain outside and to a long boring day of the usual lessons and tasks. I thought longingly of the pearls, the ring, and the silver brooch, taken away from me and hidden safely in a closet so that I couldn’t lose or break them. But as the weeks stretched on, I gradually returned my attention to my old doll, Sukey, to my whip, and to my little model knights. Although they were the same old toys, I did invent some new games.

Previously, the knights had been engaged in a lengthy war against the evil bodkins, whose fortress was the sewing box. But now they preferred to rescue Sukey from the dark and powerful forces occupying the clothes chest, uniting their puny strength to carry her along upon a palanquin fashioned from a velvet cushion.

Aunt Margaret was just as tiresome as before, lecturing me on how I was far too old to play with Sukey now.

Along with my beloved Henny, I saw my aunt every single day. My father, on the other hand, came and went on visits as colourful but as short as the lives of the blowsy pink roses that blossomed around the pointed stone porch that led into our Great Hall. During the dreary stretches when he was away, I always told people the king was keeping him busy “at court.” Really, though, I knew that often he was only visiting our outlying estates.

When my father was at home, my morning lessons were fun, exciting even. Sometimes he would stride in unexpectedly, dismissing Aunt Margaret. He would tell me about strange lands beyond the sea, lands from which our spices came and that were populated by men with one eye and one leg. Or sometimes he would show me his astrolabe. And now that I was betrothed, we would occasionally decipher books by putting English and Latin side by side, so that I could help my future husband with his legal affairs and his library.

But my aunt’s lessons were a much more mundane affair, more often than not to do with the necessity of being a good Christian, giving alms to the poor, sitting up straight, and behaving correctly in company. If we did writing, I had to copy out A maid should be seen and not heard, and I was supposed to embroider the same words onto the cushion I had been working on for a good eighteen months. However hard I tried, I never got further than A maid should . . . I often completed it in different ways in my head, like A maid should never touch a needle or A maid should kill dragons.

After my betrothal, I felt even more impatient than usual with Aunt Margaret’s attempts to teach me how to make cordials in our still room and cream cheeses in our dairy. She forced me to watch as again and again she and Henny turned out cordials in one, or squidgy white cheeses in the other.

“But, Aunt,” I cried, “I’m going to be a countess very shortly. I shall have many, many women to do these jobs for me.”

“And if you don’t know how to do things properly for yourself, Elizabeth, they will trick you and skimp you in their work,” she rapped back at me, as I swizzled the wooden dipstick in the honeypot.

So we went steadily on through the twelve days of Christmas and through the deadest, coldest, greyest part of the Derbyshire year. The long evenings had the compensation of tales told by the fireside from long-ago times, of battles and ghosts and strange spirits of the hills. The stories were recounted to all the household servants gathered together in the Great Hall by our old men, blind Mr. Nutkin and ancient Mr. Steward, the father of the current Mr. Steward.

When the catkins came at last, though, my father came home, and this time he had genuinely been at court and had ridden all the way from London. We were gathered outside the porch to meet him, having expected him all day.

“News!” he said, panting, almost before he was off his horse. “In June the king is to travel on progress round the country. And he’s coming to Derbyshire!”

Aunt Margaret had grabbed the horse’s head, even though the stable boy was ready to do it. If I didn’t know that her blood was cold, like a lizard’s, I’d have said she was excited.

“Will he come here? Anthony! Will he come to Stoneton?”

“Not to Stoneton,” said my father regretfully, jumping down from the saddle. He turned to pick me up round the waist and swing me up towards the sky. “But almost as good. He’s staying with the Earl of Westmorland, in his fine new house, and we’re all invited. You’re going too, Eliza, to meet the king.”

I whooped out loud as he whooshed me through the air. When he had set me down on the ground once more, he turned to instruct the stable boy. But then, over his shoulder, almost as an afterthought, he tossed out another piece of information.

And this was the one that really made my heart thud like the galloping hoofs of my father’s horse.

“Of course, Eliza, you’ll meet the earl’s son. Your husband!”