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just ask her to teach me how to be royal.
    All I’ve succeeded at is making myself look stupid. And possibly a bit deranged.
    “Peace and quiet?”
    It seems like a reasonable request. Court is noisy. Crowded. There is no such thing as privacy.
    “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
    Margaret shakes out her sleeves, picks up her book, and stands. This is where Mother would point out everything I’ve done wrong. My manner is wrong; my state of dress is wrong. Probably wanting to befriend Margaret in the first place is wrong.
    “I didn’t mean—”
    “To offend me?”
    She rests her book on her hip, held in place by her hand. Her knuckles are larger than most women’s, her fingers long and slender. Not like mine, which almost appear jointless, merely short, round sausages. She makes a noise deep in her throat and I look back up at her hard expression, the eyes giving nothing away.
    “To take my place by the window?” she asks. “To displace me?”
    “Displace you?” I ask.
    “From my seat. From my place at court.”
    She means that I have risen suddenly from being the awkward daughter of a duke to claiming a status comparable to hers.
    “I didn’t ask for your seat or your place.” I don’t intend to ingratiate myself, but years of living with my mother have made my tone habitually subservient.
    “Did you not hear the queen? We are
equal
. I am the king’s niece, and who are you?”
    No one.
I refuse to repeat my mother’s words. But I hear them. Feel them.
    “I’m married to the king’s son.”
    “And he will displace me in the succession,” Margaret says. “Just you wait and see. Even Elizabeth could be surpassed by a boy—no matter that he’s illegitimate. Especially if that boy has a son.”
    I almost choke. “Fitz is unlikely to have a son anytime soon. He won’t even look at me.”
    Margaret blinks. And then laughs. “I’ve never met anyone so . . . honest before, Your Grace.”
    “My mother says it’s my worst fault.” I reconsider this. In my mother’s eyes, all of my faults are heinous. And countless.
    “Your mother comes from good, dishonest stock.”
    I frown. She means my grandfather, the Duke of Bucking-ham, executed twelve years ago for his pretensions to the throne.
    “I think many of us hope to leave a better legacy than our parents,” I tell her.
    Margaret looks away, twists her long fingers around her book, and then regards me steadily. “Forgive me. I did not mean to disparage your family.”
    “And I did not mean to displace you,” I say, hoping my tone conveys that I feel no offense. “I also did not mean to chase you from your window seat. I only sought a place to sit, and an amiable companion.”
    “So, not peace and quiet.”
    A wicked smile lifts her lips as she throws the half lie back at me. She has proven that honesty is not my greatest fault.
    She sits and pats the window seat beside her. I acquiesce silently.
    “You’re a duchess,” Margaret says, tilting her chin down and looking at me critically. “And you don’t know how to be.”
    Her assessment hits me like a slammed door. I stare straight ahead, unseeing, into the gallery. And I say nothing. I don’t belong anywhere else, either.
    “Your mother is one,” she says. “Follow her example.”
    “God forbid.” The words spill out and I can’t take them back. Treacherous tongue, slandering a Howard.
    But Margaret laughs. It transforms her. Softens her. Just enough so I think I can tell her the truth.
    “Margaret,” I begin. “I was never going to amount to much. Hal was always an earl, and always going to be a duke. Mother even hoped the dukedom of Buckingham would be revived for him and he’d be two dukes in one, like Fitz. But me? At best, I aspired to marry an earl. Possibly only a knight with delusions of grandeur. That’s what the Howards do with their girls.”
    Margaret sniffs. “True. Look at your aunt.”
    “Which one?”
    Margaret chuckles. “You have a Howard aunt who