It starts to rain by the time I have the baggage train packed and ready to go and I pull my hood up over my head, mount my horse, and lead the way out of the yard and down the muddy hill.
We go painfully slow. My husband the earl and the queen can canter on the grassy verges, and he knows the bridleways and shortcuts through woods and leads her splashing through streams. They will have a pleasant journey through the country with half a dozen companions. They will gallop on the high moors and then drop down to the shaded paths beside the rivers where the trees make an avenue of green. But I, fretting about the wagons and the household goods, have to go as slowly as the heaviest cart can lumber along the muddy lanes. When we lose a wheel, we all halt for several hours in the rain to make repairs; when a horse goes lame, we have to stop and take it from the shafts, and hire another at the next village. It is hard labor and I might begrudge it if I had been born and raised as a lady. But I was not born a lady; I was born and raised as a working woman and I still take great joy in doing hard work, and doing it well. I don’t pretend to be a lady of leisure. I have worked for my fortune and I take a pride in it. I am the first woman in my family to rise from poverty by my own efforts; actually I am the first woman in Derbyshire to own great property in my own right. I am the first woman that I know to use my own judgment to make and keep a fortune. This is why I love the England of Elizabeth: because a woman like me, born as low as me, can make and keep my own fortune.
The last few miles of the journey to Wingfield follow the course of the river. It is evening by the time we get there and at least the rain has lifted. I am wet through, but at any rate I can put back my hood and look around me at the most beautiful approach to my lord’s favorite house. We ride along the floor of the valley, with moorhen scuttering away into the water of the river and lapwing calling in the evening sky, then we round the corner and see, across the water meadows, the beautiful palace of Wingfield, rising above the trees, like a heavenly kingdom. The marshes lie beneath it with mist coiling off the waters; I can hear the croaking of frogs and the booming of the bittern. Above the water is a thick belt of trees, the ash coming green at last, the willows whispering in thick clumps. A throstle thrush sings, its warble sharp against the dusk, and there is a whisper of white like a ghost as a barn owl sweeps past us.
This is a Talbot property, belonging to my husband, inherited from his family, and I never see it without thinking how well I have married: that this palace should be one of the great houses that I may count as my home. It is a cathedral, it is an etching of stone against sky. The high arched windows are traceries of white stone, the turrets ethereal against the evening sky, the woods like billowing clouds of fresh green below it, and the rooks are cawing and settling for the night as we ride up the muddy track towards the house and they throw open the great gates.
I had sent half my household ahead of us to prepare, so that when the queen and my husband the earl rode in together, hours earlier, they arrived in afternoon sunshine and to a band of musicians. When they entered the great hall there were two huge fires either end of the room to warm them, and the servants and the tenantry lined up, bowing. By the time I arrive, at dusk, with the rest of the household furniture, the valuables, and the portraits, gold vessels, and other treasures, they are already at dinner. I go in to find them seated in the great hall, just the two of them at the high table, she in my husband’s place, her cloth of estate over her throne, thirtytwo dishes before her, my husband seated on an inferior chair just below her, serving