Edward manages to attend the opening of parliament but then he takes to his bed. The councillors and the lawyers go in and out of his bedroom and the rumor is that he is planning the succession and writing his will. I find this hard to believe. He is only fifteen—we are the same age—I cannot believe that he is making a will. He is too young to prepare to die. Surely, the summer will come and he will go on progress and in the warm weather he will lose his cough and be well again? I think if he would just come to Bradgate and sit in the gardens and walk by the river and take a boat out on our wide, beautiful lakes, he would be certain to get well again. His will can be stored with all the great papers of the council and forgotten about. He will marry and have a son and all the calculations of which heir might attract whose support will be forgotten. He will marry a great princess from Europe with a mighty fortune, and I will become her friend and a great lady at court, probably a duchess. I might marry Ned Seymour despite his father’s disgrace. He might regain the title; I might still be a famously learned duchess and a light before the unworthy.

GREENWICH PALACE,

SPRING 1553

The court travels to Greenwich, everyone’s favorite palace, downriver from the noise and smells of London, its golden quayside washed by the tide twice a day, shining like a heavenly shore. It would be a mirror of the kingdom of heaven, except for the almost total absence of the godly. Father and I are rowed with the king in the royal barge, but Edward lies back on the cushions, wrapped in furs as if he is shivering, and when the guns roar from the Tower and the ships at anchor fire their cannon, he flinches at the noise and turns his pale face away.

“He will get better, won’t he?” I ask my father quietly. “He looks terribly ill; but he will get better in summer?”

He shakes his head, his face dark. “He has made a will,” he says. I can hear the excitement tremble in his voice. “He has chosen his heir.”

“Doesn’t the throne have to go to the eldest kin?”

“Of course. It should be Princess Mary. But how can she be queen when she has sworn obedience to the Bishop of Rome? How can she be queen when she is certain to marry a papist foreigner and set him over us? No, the king has done the right thing; he has obeyed God’s will and excluded her from the succession—just as his father did.”

“Can the king name his heir?” I question. “Is it even the law?”