‘That’s Jane, I think,’ Tom Seymour says. ‘Sit up straight, sister.’

Jane puts her hands to her head, gingerly, as if the construction might be hot. ‘Leave it alone,’ her mother snaps. ‘You wore it before. You’ll get used to it.’

From somewhere Bess produces a length of fine black veiling. ‘Sit still.’ She begins to pin it to the back of the box, her face absorbed. Ouch, that was my neck, Jane says, and Tom Seymour gives a heartless laugh; some private joke of his, too unseemly to share, but one can guess. ‘I’m sorry to keep you, Master Secretary,’ Bess says, ‘but she has to get this right. We cannot have her reminding the king of, you know.’

Just take care, he thinks, uneasy: it is only four months since Katherine died, perhaps the king does not want to be reminded of her either.

‘We have several more frames at our command,’ Bess tells her sister, ‘so if you really can’t balance it, we can take the whole thing down and try again.’

Jane closed her eyes. ‘I’m sure it will do.’

‘How did you get them so quickly?’ he asks.

‘They have been put away,’ Lady Margery says. ‘In chests. By women like myself who knew they would be needed again. We shall not see the French fashions now, not for many a year, please God.’

Old Sir John says, ‘The king has sent her jewels.’

‘Things La Ana had no use for,’ Tom Seymour says. ‘But they will all come to her soon.’

Bess says, ‘I suppose Anne will not want them, in her convent.’

Jane glances up: and now she does it, now she meets the eyes of her brothers, and pulls her gaze away again. It is always a surprise to hear her voice, so soft and so unpractised, its tone so at odds with what she has to say. ‘I do not see how that can work, the convent. First Anne would claim that she was carrying the king’s child. Then he would be forced to wait on her, without result, for there is never a result. After that she would think of new delays. And meanwhile none of us would be safe.’

Tom says, ‘She knows Henry’s secrets, I dare say. And would sell them to her friends the French.’

‘Not that they are her friends,’ Edward says. ‘Not any more.’

‘But she would try,’ Jane says.

He sees them, closing ranks: a fine old English family. He asks Jane, ‘Would you do anything you can, to ruin Anne Boleyn?’ His tone implies no reproach; he’s just interested.

Jane considers: but only for a moment. ‘No one need contrive at her ruin. No one is guilty of it. She ruined herself. You cannot do what Anne Boleyn did, and live to be old.’

He must study Jane, now, the expression on her downturned face. When Henry courted Anne she looked squarely at the world, her chin tilted upwards, her shallow-set eyes like pools of darkness against the glow of her skin. But one searching glance is enough for Jane, and then she casts her eyes down. Her expression is withdrawn, brooding. He has seen it before. He has been looking at pictures these forty years. When he was a boy, before he ran away from England, a picture was a splayed cunt chalked on a wall, or a flat-eyed saint you studied while you yawned through Sunday Mass. But in Florence the masters had painted silver-faced virgins, demure, reluctant, whose fate moved within them, a slow reckoning in the blood; their eyes were turned inwards, to images of pain and glory. Has Jane seen such pictures? Is it possible that the masters drew from life, that they studied the face of some woman betrothed, some woman being walked by her kin to the church door? French hood, gable hood, it is not enough. If Jane could veil her face completely, she would do it, and hide her calculations from the world.