LITMIR.BIZ

       PROLOGUE 1

      WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1610 ELIZABETH

       Today, I learned what I am for. I think that the information has always been there, but I’ve chosen to ignore it. Then, this morning, when the Duc de Bouillon looked me up and down and allowed that I was indeed ‘handsome enough’, my grip on wilful ignorance began to slip.

       I felt a tide of unbecoming red begin to rise from the top of my bodice. I tried to imagine that I had turned into a tortoise so that I could pull my head inside my shell and close the flap.

       I was standing in the Great Presence Chamber on show as a prospective bride, weighed down by a pearl-crusted blue satin gown, with a chain of bright little enamelled gold flowers draped across my (still-improving) breasts. My hair had been savagely disciplined. My finest pearl and sapphire ear-drops knocked at my jawbones. Ten pairs of adult male eyes, including my father’s chilly gaze, stared at me as if I were a greyhound or horse for sale.

       ‘Good breeding,’ I imagined them saying. ‘Shame about the cow hocks.’ ‘Nice deep chest, not certain about the set of the ears…’

       ‘Handsome enough,’ the duke had said. I tried to think what had made me so uneasy.

      Such guarded praise might have squashed my vanity, if I had any. I know how I look—tall and skinny with wild amber-red hair and fair Scottish skin. I may not be beautiful, like Frances Howard or fair, dainty Lucy, Countess of Bedford, but I’m not a trowie crept from under a stone, neither. But there was more to my sudden unease than hurt feelings.

       Since I can remember, I’ve known that my father will marry me off, when and where he pleases. Marriage meant exile. I would be forced to leave my brother, to go, again, to a strange country to live among foreigners, with a man I didn’t know, to be his queen. Just as my poor mother had to leave her home in Denmark for Scotland to live with my father. And then had to follow him here to England.

       I know that my brother Henry has no more choice in his fate than I, but at least he knows where he will be when he becomes king. He can let himself learn to love England. It’s his country now. My heart must not settle here.

       That is the price of escaping from my father.

       ‘She’s tall for her tender years,’ said the Duc de Bouillon. The marriage broker for the German state of the Palatine slid his probing eyes over me again with a private adult male gleam that made me squirm and look away. My chest and face burned. My grip on wilful ignorance slipped a little further.

       My father, a smallish man, moved his mouth as if chewing and scratched his neck. He didn’t trouble himself to reply. He knows that his wits are quicker than those of most men. And he’s the king, so he can play the fool if he wants to.

       ‘Of course, there’s no harm if the wife is taller than her husband,’ de Bouillon added quickly.

       My mother is taller than my father.

       My father still said nothing. He was behaving well, for him.

       I rested my hands on the shelf of my farthingale and looked at the floor. The white ostrich plumes of my fan trembled in my fist. I felt a secret meaning in the duke’s words, which I did not yet grasp. I saw secret understanding gleam in other male eyes.

       I know that I would be married even if I had tiny eyes like a badger and the stumpy legs of those German hounds they send down the badger’s hole—which I don’t. I am the First Daughter of England. Whoever marries me marries England. ‘Handsome’ has nothing to do with it.

       The Dauphin of France, the most likely of my possible husbands according to my old nurse Mrs Hay, is a sulky, big-nosed boy not handsome enough for any purpose that I can think of. And yet his mother means to arrange a good marriage for him, in spite of his nose and absence of chin, like a trout—although I wrong the trout, which is a beautiful creature, all polished pewter-brown and speckled silver with the flush of dawn lining its gills. Also, its wits are sharper than his from what I hear. And its temper is less haughty, irritable and melancholy.

       Handsome enough for what, then? I glanced up.

       The duke’s

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