It starts as little more than a joke. Janey and I must have proposed half a dozen suitors for each other in the years that we have been friends, but as Ned rides with us, and walks in the garden, takes us into dinner, and bets on the cards that we play in the evenings, he continues his warm flirtatious intimate tone with me, and I blush and giggle and slowly, slowly, find a reply. Gradually, carefully, it turns from a joke into a real courtship, and I know that I am, for the first and last time, really truly in love.

Everyone can see it. It is not just Janey who remarks that we are a beautiful couple, matched in height and looks and breeding. The whole household conspires to leave us together, or direct us to each other.

“His lordship is in the stable yard,” one of the grooms says to me as I come from the front door to go riding.

“Lady Katherine is in the garden walking her pug,” they tell him when he rides in after an errand for his mother.

“The ladies are in the library... the young ladies are sewing in the privy chamber... his lordship is at prayer, his lordship is coming home at midday...” Everyone directs Ned to me, and me to him, until we spend all day every day together, and every time I see him I feel a thrill as if it were the very first time I have ever seen him, and every time he leaves me I wish he would never go.

“Do you love him truly?” Janey whispers longingly when we are supposed to be going to sleep, bedded down together in her big wooden bed with the curtains drawn around us, my pug and kitten and Mr. Nozzle the monkey all tucked up with us.

“I can’t say,” I reply cautiously.

“You do then,” she says with satisfaction. “For anyone can say no.”

“I shouldn’t say,” I amend.

“So you do.”

* * *

Of course Ned and Janey’s mother, Lady Anne Seymour, sees this as well as anyone else, and she calls her two children into her private chapel one morning. I am not invited. I am certain that she is going to ban them both from seeing me anymore. We will be separated, I know it. I shall be sent home. I shall be disgraced. She will say that a sister of Jane Grey cannot be seen to be flirting with Jane Grey’s former betrothed. She is a redoubtable woman who thinks very highly of herself. She may have married beneath her in her second marriage, but her first husband was the greatest man in England after the king, and she insisted on her position as wife of the lord protector. She will tell her son and heir that she has already planned his marriage with someone very important, and that he may not court me.