“The horse was very helpful,” he says, smiling down on me. “You know: trotting about here and there, galloping when needed. He is a very good horse. He stops when he is bidden, which is pleasant too.”

“I know.” I swallow, while Janey watches both of us with a sudden attentive interest.

“I’ll come back to take you both into dinner,” Ned offers. Standing at his full height, he is magnificently handsome, tall, brown-haired, hazel-eyed; he looks lean and strong in his riding breeches and high boots. He pulls down his jacket so it fits around his slim waist and bows to me and to his sister and goes from the room.

“Oh my God! You love him!” Janey crows and makes herself cough again. Mr. Nozzle jumps from my lap and goes to the door as if he would follow Ned. “You sly little thing! All this time I was thinking of Herbert and yet you love my brother, and kept it secret all this time! ‘How is the horse?’ Oh Lord! ‘How is the horse?’”

I am near to tears with laughter and shame. “Oh, don’t say anything! Don’t say another word.”

“What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t thinking at all!” I confess. “I was just looking at him. I couldn’t think of anything while he was looking at me.”

She puts a hand to her heart. “Well,” she says, snatching at a breath, “I think that answers our question. You shall marry Ned, and I will be your sister-in-law. We Seymours are the equal of any family in England, your own father picked out Ned for your sister Jane. Now you can marry him and how happy we will be! And I will be aunt to a little heir to the throne. Nobody can deny your importance when you have a Tudor-Seymour boy in the cradle! I expect Elizabeth will be his godmother and name him as her heir until she gets her own boy.”

“Elizabeth would run mad if we married,” I say with pleasure.

“Completely. But then she’d have to take you into her privy chamber, as one of her senior ladies. You would be her cousin twice over, like it or not. She’d have to make your son her heir; everyone would insist on it. Just think! My nephew for King of England!”

“My Lady Hertford,” I say, trying the title on as I might drape a bolt of fabric against my face to see the color against my fair skin.

“It suits you,” Janey says.

* * *