The King’s Daughter. Christie Dickason

boats catching the sunlight. Red and gold pennants sagging, then snapping back into life as if trying to jump from their poles. The hungry oars biting into the water and rising up to pounce again, trailing bright arcs of water through the air. The air itself pressed into my ears, thick with joyful shouting.

      My skin prickled. I am a part of all of this, I thought. For the first time, I felt it. My life. I saw myself standing on the water stairs, all copper and gold, my hair tamed under a net of pearls, my high fine collar fluttering in the breeze, ripples breaking at my feet and spreading back out into the river. Who was also cheered. Who was even now being watched and had her own part to play. Who, like her older brother, had a duty not to disappoint. No longer a child. The First Daughter of England, who carried a secret she-wolf in her bones, waiting now to welcome a foreign king. Ready to face her father in their shared world.

      I smiled and waved back at some young fishermen in a dinghy who had dared to row close enough to the steps to throw a posy of flowers at me. Their bouquet fell short and lay bobbing near the lowest step. While a boat of men-at-arms rushed to drive away the invaders, I sent a groom down into the water to retrieve the flowers. I held aloft the dripping bundle of iris and early roses and was rewarded by a chorus of delighted cheers from the retreating fishermen.

      Baby Charles pulled his hand from mine, stepped away and frowned in disapproval. He wiped a water drop from his cheek.

      The golden barges pulled in to the stairs. There was a flurry of securing, steadying, disembarking, bowing. There were more cheers from the steps, from the windows of the palace and from the turmoil of smaller boats following the royal progress up the Thames. My uncle, the king of Denmark, leapt up the water steps in three huge strides.

      ‘What charming children!’ he boomed. Hardly pausing, he pinched my cheek. Then the burly, ugly man was gone, one arm thrown across my father’s somewhat lower shoulders. My father had not seemed even to see me. With a wild look over his shoulder, Henry followed them.

      Baby Charles was removed by his nurse. Dismissed as a ‘charming child’, the First Daughter of England skulked back to her dusty temporary lodgings and waited crossly in the smell of damp plaster and rotting water weed from the river under her window.

      I would be summoned soon, I told myself. I had not come all this way nor had all those new clothes made just to have my cheek pinched in passing.

      I ate dinner alone with Anne in my lodgings, trying not to drop crumbs or make grease spots on the copper-coloured silk of my taffeta gown. It had taken me more than an hour to be dressed. I dared not change in case I was suddenly called. If I were to be called.

      After eating, I leaned on the windowsill and counted wherries on the river. I watched the sun set over the marshes. Then I had to ask my maid to brush the pink plaster dust from my gown. Briefly, I played my lute, then put it back in its case again.

      ‘I don’t know why we troubled to come to London!’ I said.

      ‘But I would never have had this gown otherwise.’ Anne smoothed a blue silk flounce.

      I need not have feared this visit, after all. The king had forgotten me.

      Or he was slighting me. Teaching me yet again how little he valued me, and how easily I could be thrown aside. I listened to the faint sounds of music. Somewhere, other people were dancing. I had never seen courtiers dancing all together. I had never danced with anyone but Anne. I wanted to dance, here at court. I wondered what would happen if I were to present myself uninvited.

      I rehearsed what I would say. Imagined the general amazement. My own dignity, as I walked fearlessly towards the king, head held high…

      When my window began to grow opaque with darkness, I was at last summoned to the Great Presence Chamber. I gathered around me what was left of the first Daughter of England and set off.

      I stopped just inside the door to stare like a gawk. I inhaled sharply and almost choked on the brew of civet, cinnamon, sandalwood, rose water and sweat. There were too many people jammed together even for such a vast space, all of them giving off a shimmering heat of urgency and importance. The air was thick with their voices and the rustling of silks and fine wools, the faint rasping of crusted gold and silver embroidery against jewelled buttons. Somewhere in the crowd, a lute and drum fought to be heard.

      ‘Wait here, your grace,’ whispered the page, who had accompanied me.

      I looked about me.

      In Scotland, even in the palaces, our ceilings were often built low to conserve the heat in the long, fierce, damp winters. We did not try to emulate God’s own space between mountains, above the sea. Here at Whitehall, the roof was so high that it vanished into the shadows above the torches, making me feel as small as an ant. At the far end of this hall, my father sat raised above his courtiers as if on an altar, with my uncle beside him holding a glass of wine.

      Even while he spoke to my uncle, the king’s bright jackdaw eyes leapt and darted, searching for something of interest, pretending not to see me waiting at the door. His fingers explored the arm of his chair, his sleeves, his buttons. Dark and heavy against the surrounding finery, he wore one of his plain quilted velvet doublets, as if scorning the extravagant efforts of the courtiers to deck themselves for him.

      The jackdaw eyes chose to see me. Though his doublet was plain, I saw the flash of unfamiliar gems on his fingers when he lifted his hand to summon me. When he angled his head, a white sun flared just above the brim of his hat.

      I moved towards him, half-terrified, half-enraged. I kept my eyes down, not from modesty but from fear of having my thoughts and senses overwhelmed.

      Life in Scotland had been all polished wood and leather, and the comfortable smells of wood smoke, dogs, damp, mice and horses. Even at Holyrood, everyone had lived bundled together, separated only by invisible lines of the respect owed to my parents. I had not altogether lied to Anne. My mother ate with her ladies, and then with Henry and me when we were there, in a cosy closet off her bed chamber. My father’s nobles leaned their elbows on the same table as he did. The king of Scotland was the chief among the other clan chiefs. He did not sit apart on an altar like an image of God.

      I advanced through a parting sea of courtiers, feeling the stares hammer at me. Voices grew sibilant with ‘she’ and ‘princess’ and my name, ‘Elizabeth’. I heard a murmur, ‘…one of the Scottish brats.’

      A lock of twisting red-gold hair had escaped from its pins. I would have blown it out of my eyes but refused to give that mocking English voice further reason to laugh at my uncouth Scottish behaviour.

      Musk and candle smoke caught at the back of my throat. A miasma of sweat and oil of roses swirled around my head.

      ‘She…’ ‘She…’ hissed the sea.

      The curve of my skirt met the line of my father’s altar plinth. The air was sickly sweet with wine vapours. I looked up. A young man sat on the dais at my father’s feet, with his arm draped over the king’s right knee.

      Tonight, unlike the fearsome man who had brushed aside the wall-hanging in Coventry, my father overflowed with satisfaction and drunken arrogance. He seemed to tremble on the edge of bad behaviour, like a child overwrought by too many fine gifts.

      ‘Here’s my little Bessie!’ he shouted. ‘My country mouse has ventured out of her hole at last!’

      A red flush began to climb my chest. I curtsied faultlessly.

      ‘Would she not make any father proud?’ he demanded at large. The rings on his fingers flashed. A knife blade of light from the diamond on his hat sliced across my vision. Another gust of wine fumes reached me on his breath.

      Burning with humiliation, I put on my chilliest face and let the crudely exacted compliments rain down on me.

      ‘Is she not a pearl beyond price, monsewer?’ My father leaned forward and aimed this question past Wee Bobby Cecil, squarely between the eyes of a French-dressed envoy standing in the front rank of attending courtiers and foreign visitors.

      The sight of the Secretary