“Of course! We should try very hard to be nothing like Jane. We should live for joy and seek pleasure. The one thing that Jane’s death should teach us is that life is precious and every day is a gift that we should treasure. Turn your coat! Turn your collar! Retract your promise!”

“That’s not what she wanted to teach us,” I say, thinking of “Learn you to die.”

“I don’t think she was a very good teacher or a very good example,” Mary says boldly.

I am as shocked as if Jo the pug suddenly stood on her hind legs. I had no idea that my little sister had thought of this at all. I had always thought that she was too young to understand what happened to Jane and—to my shame—I had thought that her little stature meant that she did not hear all the discussions and debate that rage so far above her pretty hood.

Her dark eyes spark with irritation and then she smiles. “I shall find my own philosophy and live my own life,” she tells me. “And I shall fear nothing.”

She walks past me and someone asks her to dance. I see her lining up with the other girls who are twice her height but not nearly as pretty, and none of them as wise. I think of her, not four feet tall but fearing nothing, and I think—I can’t tell the queen, I can’t bear to ruin Mary.

I think I will tell our aunt Bess—Lady St. Loe. She’s not the most tenderhearted woman in the world, but she loved my mother and she promised me her friendship. She said at my mother’s funeral that I could turn to her. She’s a woman of vast experience, married to three men, and I have lost count of the number of her children. She will know the signs of pregnancy and when a baby is due. She must understand how love can drive you forward beyond where you should, perhaps, have gone. And she is friend and confidante to Elizabeth. If she takes my news well, then surely she can confess for me and make it all right?

* * *