The time chosen for my appointment was carefully judged to avoid this. The tide is flowing upstream and the barge goes swiftly with an icy wind behind it, but it is not fast enough to outpace the news that Lady Katherine, the bride of handsome Ned Seymour, is out of the Tower at last and going to Lambeth. By the time the rowers feather their oars to bring us alongside the quay at the palace, everyone on the horse ferry is crowded over to the side nearest my barge, and everyone on the riverbank and quayside is cheering wildly for me.

I stand up so that they can see me. I wave my hand.

“My lady, please come this way,” the archbishop’s steward says nervously, but he cannot prevent me smiling to the crowd and acknowledging the shouted blessings.

“Fear nothing!” someone screams at me.

“God bless you and your bonny boy!”

“God save the queen!” someone else shouts, but they don’t say who they mean.

I wave as if I take the blessing to myself and I go as slowly as I dare into the dark archway of the palace, so that everyone can see that I am a prisoner going in to questioning, that I am young—I am still only twenty-one—that I am beautiful. I am—as I have always been, as I always will be—the rightful heir for Queen of England, sister to the sainted Queen Jane, and now everyone is starting to think this, too.

LAMBETH PALACE, LONDON,

WINTER 1562

I knew Archbishop Parker when he was all but chaplain to Jane’s father-in-law, John Dudley. He and other reformers met constantly to discuss the theology of the reformed Church of England, and Jane was in correspondence with their religious advisors. I daresay he never noticed me, I was so much the unimportant younger sister, but I remember him at Jane’s court when she was proclaimed queen, and I remember him fading away as fast as the others, sliding from the Protestant queen to the papist—despite all his promises. Then I didn’t think much of him as an advisor to a saint, and I don’t think much of him as an archbishop now.