‘But she will speak to me.’

‘She will listen.’

‘An attractive quality in women.’

‘An attractive quality in anyone. Wouldn’t you say? Though Jane above all women looks to men to tell her what she should do.’

‘Then does she do it?’

‘Not necessarily.’ She laughs. Her fingertips brush the back of his hand. ‘Come. She is ready for you.’

Warmed by the sun of the King of England’s desire, which maiden would not glow? Not Jane. She is in deeper black, it seems, than the rest of her family, and she volunteers that she has been praying for the soul of the late Katherine: not that she needs it, for surely, if any woman has gone straight to Heaven…

‘Jane,’ Edward Seymour says, ‘I am warning you now and I want you to listen carefully and heed what I say. When you come into the king’s presence, it must be as if no such woman as the late Katherine ever existed. If he hears her name in your mouth, he will cease his favour, upon the instant.’

‘Look,’ Tom Seymour says. ‘Cromwell here wants to know, are you truly and entirely a virgin?’

He could blush for her. ‘If you aren’t, Mistress Jane,’ he says, ‘it can be managed. But you must tell us now.’

Her pale, oblivious regard: ‘What?’

Tom Seymour: ‘Jane, even you must understand the question.’

‘Is it correct that no one has ever asked for you in marriage? No contract or understanding?’ He feels desperate. ‘Did you never like anybody, Jane?’

‘I liked William Dormer. But he married Mary Sidney.’ She looks up: one flash of those ice-blue eyes. ‘I hear they’re very miserable.’

‘The Dormers didn’t think we were good enough,’ Tom says. ‘But now look.’

He says, ‘It is to your credit, Mistress Jane, that you have formed no attachments till your family were ready to marry you. For young women often do, and then it ends badly.’ He feels that he should clarify the point. ‘Men will tell you that they are so in love with you that it is making them ill. They will say they have stopped eating and sleeping. They say that they fear unless they can have you they will die. Then, the moment you give in, they get up and walk away and lose all interest. The next week they will pass you by as if they don’t know you.’

‘Did you do this, Master Secretary?’ Jane asks.

He hesitates.

‘Well?’ Tom Seymour says. ‘We would like to know.’

‘I probably did. When I was young. I am telling you in case your brothers cannot bring themselves to tell you. It is not a pretty thing for a man to have to admit to his sister.’

‘So you see,’ Edward urges. ‘You must not give in to the king.’

Jane says, ‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘His honeyed words –’ Edward begins.

‘His what?’

The Emperor’s ambassador has been skulking indoors, and won’t come out to meet Thomas Cromwell. He would not go up to Peterborough for Katherine’s funeral because she was not being buried as a queen, and now he says he has to observe his mourning period. Finally, a meeting is arranged: the ambassador will happen to be coming back from Mass at the church of Austin Friars, while Thomas Cromwell, now in residence at the Rolls House at Chancery Lane, has called by to inspect his building work, extensions to his principal house nearby. ‘Ambassador!’ he cries: as if he were wildly surprised.