How hard I wept when Henny had to leave the next morning. I clung to her arms so that she gently had to prise my fingers free. Once my father’s wagon had departed through the woods and I could no longer see it, I felt that I might creep off and die somewhere by myself, like a very old dog. But there was nowhere I could go to be alone. Everywhere I went there were faces: cruel faces, yes, and one or two kindly ones as well. But all were nosy, their mouths asking constant questions.

It took me a long time to get straight all my relations at Trumpton Hall. The old duchess was rarely seen by the maidens, as we were called. If one of us heard her long white stick tapping along the passage as she came towards our chamber, there would be a sharp hiss of “The duchess!” Dice would be hidden, beds would be covered up, books snapped shut, and caps clapped back onto heads.

The eight other young ladies in the household were there, like me, to learn a little polish. We all slept together in the big attic room called “the maidens’ chamber.” From the duchess, who was grandmother to three of the girls, we would hear lengthy discourses on genealogy and the manner in which all of our families interlinked. Thus I learned that I was related to Katherine Howard, the boldest and buxomest among us, who had been so cruel to me upon my arrival. I also learned that there were many more families in England than I had thought.

“So you two are cousins!” said the duchess to us, her oldest and her newest students. She was concluding an explanation of a long parchment scroll with all the names of her relatives written in coloured ink and their coats of arms painted below them.

“Cousins!” Katherine exclaimed. “But I have never heard of the family of . . . what is it? Camden?”

“It’s Camperdowne!” I cried out, dismayed. “The oldest family in Derbyshire!” And I stabbed with my finger at the pink rose beneath my father’s name on the scroll.

“I cry you mercy,” she said. “There are so many families nearer the king whose names we have had to memorise.”

I turned to the duchess, expecting her to chastise her granddaughter for her rudeness, but a little smile flickered across her dry old face, almost as if she were amused by her star pupil’s put-down.

The other girls had also looked to the duchess for a cue. They now turned towards me as if controlled by one mind, and each of them scorched me with a pursed, fake-looking smile of her own.

I looked down at my hands and sincerely swore to myself that one day I, too, would have a phalanx of ladies-in-waiting all of my own, who would smile like sour lemons at my enemies and make them feel as uncomfortable as I was feeling now.

But it wasn’t all bad, even though I was reluctant to admit it in the letters I wrote home to my family at Stoneton. From our dancing master, Monsieur Bleu, we learned the galliard, the deep court curtsey, and the best way to run in slippers while gracefully trailing a gauzy scarf. We learned that we should skip towards a gentleman as if we couldn’t wait to meet him, at the same time divesting ourselves of a glove or a kerchief, garments that he would consider decorative but unnecessary.

We all learned to sing, although Anne Sweet, the youngest of us all, was the only one with a truly sweet voice. A little Italian was required, along with some light mathematics. All the girls were hoping to live at court some day, and we were told that many of the king’s gentlemen there liked to dabble in astrology and science. We should be able to listen intelligently to their explanations of their discoveries.

“You were so quick!” said Anne Sweet to me one morning after we had taken our turn with the astrolabe and passed it on to our classmates. “How did you know how to use it? You must have done it before!”

Then I told her that my mother had died without having provided me with any brothers, and that my father had therefore taught me things that the other girls had no need to know. “I am the future of my family,” I told her. “There’s only me to carry on the line.”

“Oh, Eliza!” said Anne. “You’re so brave!” To my annoyance, the old, shortened version of my name seemed to have followed me here to Trumpton Hall. But Anne’s chubby lips had fallen open into such a heartfelt “oh” of sympathy that I could not bring myself to tell her to call me “Elizabeth.” Her very admiration made me sit up straighter in my chair.

But I was far behind Anne and the rest when it came to the lessons in beauty that we would take from the duchess’s old waiting woman. “You’ve never used face powder?” Anne squealed, when I first confessed this. “What was your mother thinking of?”

Then the penny dropped as she remembered what I’d told her. Her cheeks turned crimson, and her mouth fell open once again. “Oh! Eliza! Forgive me!”

Full of apologies, she bustled me off to the dressing table in the corner of the maidens’ chamber and sat me down amid the pots and jars.

“This is what you need to make your skin milky white,” she said, dabbing at my cheeks with the white furry paw of a rabbit dipped in what looked like face powder. “Well, it’s only fine white bread flour,” she said in a rush, as if honesty compelled her to admit it, “but face powder does look like this. And here”— she handed me a cockle shell, in which nestled a sticky blob of red —“is cochineal. It’s for the lips.”

Using a finger, I carefully coated my mouth, pouting this way and that.

“Ooh, how adorable!” It was Katherine, coming into the room behind us and strolling over to watch, hands on her hips as usual. “The little girls are playing at being fine court ladies.”

This made me whistle out a harrumph, and I gave her a hostile glare. But I could see that Katherine was interested in the tools and tinctures on the table. Perhaps the art of makeup was a skill worth acquiring after all. Annoyingly, Katherine was so pretty that I couldn’t help admiring her a little. I could also tell, through Anne’s delighted wriggles, that she, too, was basking in the attention of the queen of Trumpton Hall.

“Don’t ask what this red stuff’s made of,” Katherine said, picking up the cockle shell in a majestic manner and applying a little to her own top lip. It had a deep curved shape to it that looked splendid picked out in red. “It’s better not to know.”

But this I could not bear.

“Katherine!” I cried. “Oh, do tell. I can’t stand a mystery.”

She knelt down beside me and put her face close to my own. “Well,” she said slowly, “you did ask. I won’t be held responsible. But my mother told me that it’s made of the bodies of rare beetles, crushed up.”

The thought almost made me gag. Shrieking, I wiped the red from my mouth as quickly as I could with a napkin. I felt physically sick.

“What are you laughing at, Anne?” I cried. “Beetles! That’s disgusting!”

“But, Eliza,” said Anne, “it’s so funny. You look exactly like my baby brother when he’s been caught eating jam without bread. There’s red all over your face.”

Eventually, infected by their laughter, my own lips first wobbled, then giggled all by themselves. “Well, then,” I said. “When I’m a fine court lady, I’m just going to use jam to stain my lips, not horrible beetles.”

At this Katherine stood up and tousled my hair. “That’s an excellent thought,” she said. “Tasty lips. They’d be nice to kiss too.”

I reminded myself that I disliked Katherine, but I could tell from Anne’s proud nod that having had her spend time with us at the dressing table was something of a privilege.

“See you later, Carrot Top,” Katherine said, as she swept swiftly out of the room.

Once again I inwardly gnashed my teeth. I was fed up with gibes about my red hair, even though Anne always came to my defence and did so now.

“The king himself has red hair,” she said to me, “so I don’t know how people can say that red hair means you’ve been taken by the devil. If it were true, it would apply to the king as well!”

“And, anyway,” I said grumpily, trying to put my hair straight where Katherine had messed with it, “I would not care if the devil came to get me. I would kick him in the shins.”

I was grateful to Anne and did my best to be proud of my distinctive hair. It had seemed so fine and bold back at Stoneton, but now I was in the south, I had secretly begun to wish that I had dark curling hair, blue eyes, full lips, and, above all, a bonny buxom chest like Katherine’s.

Anne also showed me the art of positioning the hoods we had to wear so that a gentleman would notice the vulnerable nape of our necks from behind. “If we expose our necks,” Anne said, “old Abigail says that a gentleman will feel a strange compulsion to place his hand upon them, and that will give him a pleasant feeling of great power.”

Her message was reinforced by Abigail, the duchess’s elderly waiting woman, in person. In her lessons, she constantly thrust an unfortunate analogy down our throats with respect to our deportment. “Imagine the trembling deer in the woods!” she would beg us in her quavering voice, gesturing with her hands like a dying swan. “Tremble, tremble, and offer up your neck as if it could be snapped in an instant!”

Her unfortunate imagery and choice of words made us call Abigail “Old Trembles” among ourselves. But the graceful extension of our necks for the wearing of future coronets was a lesson we all enjoyed.

The best lessons of all, and the ones in which I first began to enjoy myself at Trumpton Hall, were our studies in writing and in the notation of music. Master Manham, our teacher for these subjects, wasn’t old like Monsieur Bleu, but young and very well shaped indeed. All of us considered ourselves to be in love with him. At night in the maidens’ chamber, when we were all in bed but not yet asleep, one of us would describe how nicely his calves filled his stockings. Or another would claim he had slipped her an extra plum under the table during dinner.

At first I would lie quietly on my little low bed and merely listen to the competitive outpourings about Master Manham. As time went on, though, I found that meek Anne Sweet’s questions about my family and my home helped to melt away my reserve. And I found that I wanted the other girls to know that I had some personal experience with men and with love. After all, I had been betrothed.

I told Anne the whole story one afternoon when we were by ourselves, and in the evening she begged me to tell the story again to the maidens’ chamber in general.

“What?” gasped Juliana. “You are betrothed already? You are very young for that, Eliza.”

“Yes, indeed,” I said casually. “I was all set to become a countess. It was nothing to me really, as the title of Westmorland is much less ancient than my own family’s.”

But Katherine was too sharp to let it rest at that. “You said you were betrothed,” she pointed out. “But you didn’t say you are betrothed. What happened? Was it broken off?”

“Yes, there was . . . an administrative hitch.”

“He wanted a wife with a proper bosom, more like,” snorted Alice, another girl who was in cahoots with Katherine. She even managed to roll over in her bed in a dismissive manner.

“Actually, Eliza was too good for him.” It was Anne’s clear piping voice. “And her father realised it. She will hold out for a better offer than a viscount.”

She had the attention of the room.

“Eliza told me this in confidence,” Anne went on, “and I know she is too modest to tell you all. But I feel you should know the truth.”

I blessed my loyal Anne and silently blew her a kiss through the dark. I wished I had never mentioned the business of the Earl of Westmorland’s son, which did me no credit at all, but dear Anne had painted it in the best possible colours.

I also promised myself to speak less of my family and its antiquity, and to think a little more of trying to make my cousins like me. For sometimes, as I lay alone and full of pride, I felt jealous of their pillow fights and their discussions of which stable boy was the most handsome.

Of course I would do my duty at court, when the time came. That would involve winning the richest and highest-ranking husband, and making him fall in love with me rather than with Alice or Juliana. But here at Trumpton, I thought it could not hurt me, sometimes, to be a bit more like them.