He has the impertinence to keep me waiting in his privy chamber, and when he comes in, there is a dark-faced clerk with him, who sits down at a table without asking my permission, dips his nib in a pot of ink, and waits to write down everything that I am to say. If I had failed to observe that they sent a discreet barge to fetch me, which flew no standard, if I had overlooked the chilly anteroom, and the cool greeting from my sister’s onetime friend and coreligionist, I would know, from the poised nib of his clerk, that this is not a conversation between a spiritual advisor and a young woman who has had the misfortune to displease a bad-tempered queen. This is an interrogation, and he has been told exactly what to report. His difficulty—though he doesn’t know it yet—is that I am never going to deny my honorable marriage, forswear the man I love, or condemn my child the viscount to a new title of Ned Seymour’s by-blow.

Archbishop Parker looks at me gravely. “You had better tell me all about this pretended marriage,” he says kindly. “You had better confess to me, child.”

I take a breath to speak and I see the leap of hope in his face. If he can go back to Elizabeth and tell her that I have confessed to him that I am unmarried, that I was never married, then she will be pleased with him and continue to ignore the half-hidden presence of his own loyal wife, though she hates the idea of a married clergy. If he can tell her that I have a little ailing bastard in the Tower, then she need not feel rushed into marriage and childbed herself. If he can assure her that the reform cause has no son and heir, then she can promise Mary Queen of Scots that the inheritance of England is still unsettled, and dangle before that young woman the prospect of peace and inheritance.