Chapter 2
Huntingdon’s household ran on scripture and schedule, and I spent six years learning to move through both without complaint.
My guardian believed a young woman’s mind deserved cultivation as much as any young man’s.
So I studied French and Italian. I read history until the kings and their wars blurred together.
I practiced music and dancing with a discipline that left little room for idleness.
I was grateful for the education, even as I chafed against the rigidity that came with it.
Huntingdon and his wife ran their house like a chapel.
Prayers were at dawn, before meals, and before bed.
I learned to recite psalms with the same fluency I applied to French verbs.
What I could not learn, no matter how carefully I studied, was how to make my mother’s name disappear from conversations about mine.
I told myself I would not give anyone reason to ask those questions aloud.
Lady Huntingdon escorted me to court that same January, and I remember the anticipation nearly as sharply as I remember the arrival itself.
I had spent years hearing about Queen Elizabeth’s court secondhand, filtered through servants’ gossip and my guardian’s careful commentary.
But nothing prepared me for the reality of it.
The great hall at Whitehall seemed to hold more candles than I had ever seen assembled in one place.
The light caught every jewel, every embroidered sleeve, and every ambitious face turned toward the throne at the far end of the room.
The air itself smelled different from anything at Huntingdon’s house - wax, perfume, and the staleness of too many bodies pressed too close for too many hours.
Beneath it all was a current of noise that never quite settled.
Laughter rang out. Music came from somewhere I couldn’t see, and there was a constant murmur of people deciding who mattered and who did not.
I felt watched from the moment I entered, and I was right to feel it.
Word traveled quickly through court that Lettice Knollys’s daughter had arrived, and I could see the calculation behind polite smiles.
I noticed the way certain eyes lingered a beat too long before darting away.
I understood, walking across that hall for the first time, that I would spend my entire life being measured against my mother’s disgrace, whether I wanted the comparison or not.
Queen Elizabeth noticed me almost immediately.
I had expected coldness, given everything I knew of the queen’s feelings toward my mother.
I braced myself for a chilly reception at best. Instead, when I was presented to her, Queen Elizabeth studied me with an attention that unsettled me more than outright hostility might have.
Her eyes moved over my face, my bearing, and the careful modesty of my dress.
She was searching for traces of Lettice, and deciding in that moment whether I would prove a comfort or a reminder.
Whatever she found seemed to satisfy her, at least for the moment.
She complimented my appearance, remarked favorably on my education, and permitted me to remain at court under Lady Huntingdon’s continued supervision.
I exhaled only once I was safely out of the queen’s immediate presence, aware that I had passed some test without fully understanding its terms.
My brother Robert was waiting for me at court, and his presence made things feel less hostile than they might have.
His transition to court had been seamless.
Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex since our father’s death, had grown into a young man whose charm seemed to open doors before he even reached them.
He was three years my junior, but he carried himself with a confidence I envied.
He was utterly unbothered by whispers about our mother, or perhaps he was simply skilled at appearing unbothered.
We had spent little time together as children.
But at court, we found each other again, and the bond we formed there would shape the rest of our lives.
Robert introduced me to everyone worth knowing.
He walked beside me through gatherings where I might otherwise have felt entirely alone.
And he made it clear to anyone paying attention that the Devereux siblings intended to matter at court, regardless of what our mother had done.
I loved him fiercely for it, and I would spend decades afterward protecting that loyalty even when it cost me dearly.
It was Robert who first mentioned Philip Sidney to me. But once he said the name, I realized that I already carried a memory of Sidney from years before.
I had been perhaps twelve years old when Sidney visited Chartley alongside the queen’s progress in 1575.
He was one face among the crowd of courtiers who accompanied Queen Elizabeth on her summer travels.
I remembered him only vaguely. He was a young man already gaining a reputation for his wit and his verse, and he was polite to a child he had no reason to notice.
I could not have known then that our paths would cross again under circumstances that would follow me for the rest of my life, and even beyond it.
Sidney and I first encountered each other properly as adults in 1581.
I understood almost immediately why his reputation preceded him so thoroughly.
He was handsome in a way that seemed almost unfair for a man already so admired for his mind.
He was fair-haired, well-made, and had the kind of easy physical grace that came from years on horseback and in the tiltyard rather than simply good fortune.
He possessed a mind quick enough to outpace almost anyone at court, though he was often too polite to show it.
We spoke about poetry, the political tensions simmering across Europe, and subjects I rarely had the opportunity to discuss with anyone who took my opinions seriously.
I will not pretend I felt nothing. Sidney’s attention flattered me, and the ease of our conversation offered a kind of intellectual companionship I did not always find at court.
Other observers noticed the ease between us as well, and speculation began almost immediately that a match might be forming between the celebrated poet and Lettice Knollys’ daughter.
It was a pairing that might have satisfied everyone’s appetite for romance.
I did not encourage the speculation, though I did not entirely discourage it either.
I enjoyed Sidney’s company. And I also enjoyed, perhaps more than I should admit, the attention that came with being linked to a man so widely admired.
Whether he felt anything beyond intellectual regard, I could never say with certainty.
Sidney was careful to keep his true feelings guarded behind wit and verse.
I learned only much later, when his sonnet sequence began circulating among readers at court under the title Astrophel and Stella, how deeply he may have felt something he never spoke aloud to me directly.
Astrophel, I came to understand, was Sidney’s own reflection of himself. Stella, the readers whispered, was me.
However genuine his feelings may have been, feelings rarely influenced marriages among families like mine.
I understood this even as the gossip about Sidney and me continued through the following months.
I knew that my guardian held the authority to arrange my marriage, and Huntingdon had never given any indication that Sidney featured in his actual plans for my future, regardless of what court gossip assumed.
I should have paid closer attention to that distinction. But I allowed myself to enjoy the flattery of being thought of as Sidney’s intended without asking what Huntingdon actually intended.
The answer arrived that spring, delivered not through romantic overture but through the cold negotiation between men who controlled my future without feeling any particular obligation to consult me first.
Huntingdon called me to him one afternoon. His expression was the flat, closed one he wore only when a matter was already settled. I remember the room being colder than the season warranted, or perhaps that was simply how my memory chooses to remember the moment that altered everything afterward.
“I have secured the queen’s assent,” he told me, “for your marriage.”
I waited, foolishly still hoping to hear Sidney’s name.
“Robert Rich,” he said instead, “has asked for your hand, and I have accepted on your behalf.”
I do not remember exactly what I said in response, if I said anything coherent at all.
I remember only the sensation of the floor tilting slightly beneath me.
I remember the realization crashing over me that whatever I had allowed myself to imagine about Sidney was never possible in the first place.
Robert Rich was wealthy, connected, and entirely unknown to me beyond his reputation as a Puritan gentleman more concerned with ledgers than verse.
I curtsied, murmured whatever gratitude was expected of me, and left Huntingdon’s presence with my composure intact and my mind racing.
I did not weep. Not where anyone could see it.
I walked to the small window at the end of the gallery instead.
I stood there long enough that Lady Huntingdon eventually came looking for me.
Her face arranged itself into the polite concern of a woman who already knew the answer to whatever she was about to ask.
I told her I was only tired. She did not believe me, and she did not press.
I understood that this was a kind of mercy.
She had decided to let me grieve quietly for a future I’d never truly been permitted to have.
In the months that followed, I would learn that marriage negotiations move forward with or without a bride’s enthusiasm.
Huntingdon had done precisely what a careful guardian was expected to do: He’d secured a wealthy, respectable match for his ward.
It was a match that would protect my future without requiring anyone to consider whether it might also break my heart before it had properly opened to anyone at all.
I thought of Sidney more than once in the weeks that followed.
I wondered whether he had heard the news.
I wondered whether he felt anything at all beyond the polite disappointment expected of a man whose flirtation had simply failed to develop into something more permanent.
I never asked him directly. I knew that some questions were safer left unspoken.
They were best left buried beneath the composure a young woman was expected to maintain no matter what storms moved beneath the surface.
I was eighteen years old. I was celebrated at court for my beauty and my wit.
I was admired by a poet whose verses would one day make my name immortal in ways I could not yet imagine.
And none of it mattered. Not really. Because my marriage had already been decided by men who saw me as an asset to be placed rather than a woman with preferences of her own.
Whatever future I had imagined for myself, standing in that cold room, I understood it was no longer mine to imagine freely.