“I don’t see what else we could do,” my father says patiently. “I put your case very strongly, but it was the solution of the king’s own devising to get us to a king within a generation.”

“It puts John Dudley’s grandson on the throne!” my mother explodes with anger. “That is why he has brought the council round to the king’s wishes! John Dudley planned this from the very beginning: Jane crowned queen in my place, and Guildford Dudley beside her, and that tribe of Dudley brothers become royal dukes! Whereas I—the daughter of the Queen of France, the niece of the King of England—am passed over. And you tell me I must agree to it!”

Quietly my father regards her. “Nobody is denying your royal blood,” he says. “It is that which brought the king to Jane in the first place. Your right passes to her, and you become My Lady the Queen’s Mother, the greatest woman at court after her.”

“I shall have to pray on this,” I tell him. “It cannot be right. The king has sisters.”

“The king prayed on it, we all did,” he says. “God told him that it was the only way to get a Tudor boy on the throne.”

“And I am to have him?” I ask, thinking of Guildford’s painful fumblings. “I am to conceive a Tudor heir, and give birth to a Tudor boy where five wives could not?”

“If it is God’s will,” my father reminds me. “And you will be head of the Church of England. Think of that, Jane. Think of that.”

* * *

I go to pray. My little sister Mary finds me in the chapel, on my knees, gazing blankly at the white wall behind the bare table of the altar. All around us like ghosts are the shadowy outlines of the paintings of the saints showing through the limewashed walls, frescoes that were bright and inspiring when the chapel was first built and people needed such toys because they had no Bible and were not allowed to pray directly to God. I must do anything to save my country from slipping back into those times, enslaved to a distant pope, with a papist queen preaching lies to an ignorant people.

“The Duchess of Northumberland, your mother-in-law, has sent for you,” Mary whispers. She stands beside me as I kneel and her head is the same height as mine. “Sent one of her ladies-in-waiting to tell our lady mother that you have to go home to them at once. She said that you were disobedient and that it would be the undoing of all of us if you are not to hand when they need you.”

I look up but, stubbornly, I don’t move. “I won’t go.”