I know at once that they are talking of Edward the king, who has said publicly that he will marry a foreign princess with a queenly dowry. I, myself, have never thought anything different, though some people say that I would make a wonderful queen, and I would be a light and a beacon of the new reformed religion and speed religious reform in a country that is painfully half-hearted, even now. I make sure that I keep my head bowed and I don’t say a word.

“But they’re so suited,” my father pleads. “Both so scholarly, both so devout. And our Jane would be such a rightful heir to Kateryn Parr. We raised her for this; Queen Kateryn trained her for this.”

I can feel my mother’s eyes scrutinizing me, but I don’t look up. “She would make the court into a convent!” she says, laughing.

“A light in the world,” my father replies seriously.

“I doubt it will ever happen. At any rate, Lady Jane, you can consider yourself promised in marriage to Edward Seymour until we tell you different.”

My father puts his hand under my elbow and raises me up from my knees. “You’ll be a duchess, or something better,” he promises me. “Don’t you want to know what might be better? What about the throne of England?”

I shake my head. “I have my eyes on a heavenly crown,” I tell him, and I ignore my mother’s vulgar snort of laughter.

SUFFOLK PLACE, LONDON,

SPRING 1553

It is as well that I don’t set my heart on handsome Ned Seymour as a husband. His father’s return to power is short-lived and ends in his death. He was caught conspiring against John Dudley, and arrested, charged, and then executed for treason. The head of the family is dead, and the family ruined again. His famously proud wife, Anne Stanhope, who once had the criminal pride to push my tutor Dowager Queen Kateryn to one side so that she might go first in to dinner, is widowed and imprisoned in the Tower. Ned does not come to court at all. I was lucky to escape marriage with a young man who—however kind his eyes—is now the disgraced son of a traitor.

It is as well that I never let my father’s ambition enter my prayers either, though I cannot help but know that all the reforming churchmen, all the Protestant believers, every living saint in England, wants me to marry the king and to lead a kingdom of pilgrims to our heavenly home. Not that my cousin King Edward says this—he insists that he will marry a royal from somewhere abroad; but clearly he cannot tolerate a papist princess. Of all the Protestant girls, I am the most suitable, devoted to the religion that he and I share, childhood friends, and the daughter of a princess of the blood.