face, her eyes were as dark as mine. That’s why I loved her even more, from that moment on, no matter what befell.
When the queen paused on the bridge over the lake, my father and I scrambled to get a good vantage point. We heard the Lady of the Lake greet the queen from her floating island, declaring in fine words how tradition said Kenilworth was once upon a time one of King Arthur’s castles of Camelot and how the lady had stayed in the lake awaiting the arrival of the next great monarch.
The couplets of the poem carried quite well over the water, once everyone hushed. I hoped Will could hear these glorious words for, as far as I was concerned, they surpassed any in the two plays we’d seen in the Guild Hall.
“And now,” the lovely lady on the island said to the queen, still ahorse on the bridge,
“Pass on, Madam, you need no longer stand;
The Lake, the Lodge, the Lord are yours to command.”
“Is the lord indeed mine to command?” the queen’s bell-clear voice rang out. “I would prefer to win all of your hearts!”
Everyone gasped as she swept an arm toward us and then rode into the castle. I mouthed those few words over and over. Such a short speech but so full of wisdom and wit—and power over a man, over a land, over us all.
I felt giddy and hardly startled when a gunfire salute rent the air, nor later when the sky boomed to life with the shooting stars, pikes of pleasure and whirling squibs of fireworks that reflected in the water. The bridge on which the queen had entered stood empty, and when at last the sky slipped into silence, my father pulled me away to sleep on the ground with him and his carriers around a fire.
But I didn’t sleep a wink and knew there was naught else I would ever want from life now that I’d seen the queen. That is until I overheard the next morn that one of Her Majesty’s entertainments one week hence would be on the bridge, given by an Italian tumbler who was “skilled at somersaults, turnings, caperings, and, upon the thin railings above the waters, fanciful flights.”
Of course I was wild to return to Kenilworth to see the Italian tumbler, but my father’s pack train was bound for London the next week. He forbade me to go back, even if someone would take me. So, I vowed I would go with no one. But once I was deposited with the Whateleys on Henley Street and the pack train disappeared over Clopton Bridge, I set my plans in motion to go on my own.
“I’m bound and determined to see and speak with that tumbler,” I confided to Will, Dick and Kat as we met under the bridge the next day. “I won’t tell a lie to my father, even if he asks me later if I went—”
“Which,” pretty, brown-haired Kat put in with a toss of her curls, “he probably won’t ask, because he doesn’t say much. And you said he doesn’t like to bring up anything to remind him of your mother. I should like to have a love that dear someday,” she added with a sigh and sideways glance at Dick.
“Hell’s gates, leave off!” he declared, using one of the oaths he’d picked up when he delivered new-made tuns, kegs and firkins to the Burbages’ inn on Bridge Street. “Let’s just cut to the quick. How’s Anne going to get to Kenilworth and back without being caught?”
“And without being harmed,” Will added. He kept twisting his new seal ring his father had bought him. It bore some decorations and his initials W.S. in reverse so the blob of wax into which he pressed it would be readable. He prized it above all else, yet, it seemed to me, the ring made him feel as anxious as important.
“Anne,” he said, “you saw the hangers-on round the castle precincts. You may be yet young, but you are a fetching maid, and someone could give you trouble.”
Our gazes snagged. His face flushed, and something strange and unspoken leaped between us before he looked away. It was the first moment I felt more for Will than gratitude or envy, somehow all mixed up with other emotions I could not name.
“But the tumbler is to entertain at midday,” I argued. “If I go at first light on one of my father’s horses he’s left behind to rest in our