“It says that they rang the bells for her and the villagers prayed for her recovery.”

“Did she say anything for me?”

“She said: Farewell, Good Sister.”

I hear the words that Jane said to Katherine, that Katherine now says to me. But I have no one to bless. Now that Katherine has gone there is no sister for me. I am an orphan alone.

“Then she said, Lord Jesus receive my spirit, and she closed her eyes with her own hands and she left us.”

“I don’t know how to bear this,” I say quietly. I push myself to the edge of the seat and I drop down to the floor. “I really don’t know how to bear it.”

My lady grandmother takes my hands but does not crush me in her arms. She knows that the grief I feel is far, far beyond the reach of any easy comfort. “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; the Lord hath done His pleasure, now blessed be the name of the Lord,” she tells me.

* * *

Of course, our cousin the queen gives Katherine a magnificent funeral. How she does love a funeral, especially family! Katherine is buried in the village church at Yoxford, far from her home, far from the resting place of her mother, far from her husband’s family chapel; but Elizabeth orders the court into mourning and manages to paint into an expression of grief on her false face. Seventy-seven official mourners attend from court, along with a herald and court servants; Katherine’s arms are displayed in the chapel on banners, pennons, and banderoles. Everything that can exalt a Tudor princess is done for her. Katherine in death is recognized and honored, as in life she was persecuted and ignored.

Elizabeth does not allow me to attend. Of course not. She only loves her heirs when they predecease her. The last thing she wants is someone pointing out that if Katherine was a Tudor princess then her little sister is one too—and the last of the line. The last thing she wants is a live cousin, especially when she is ostentatiously mourning a conveniently dead one. My stepgrandmother is allowed to say the farewell to Katherine in death that she was forbidden in life, and she goes and comes back very somber and says that it is a tragedy of her life that she has to bury children.