The King’s Daughter. Christie Dickason

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ