I stay in my room in a fury of grief. I can hardly breathe from grief at the loss of my sister and my hatred for the queen. I hardly eat: the household has to persuade me to take something once a day at least. I think it would matter not at all if I were to die for I could not say good-bye to my sister nor can I care for her children. I cannot be with my husband nor care for his children. Elizabeth has made me as lonely as she is, an only child as she is, an orphan as she is. I think her heart must be as small as mine, her imagination stunted to the age when her mother died and nobody knew who she was. I may be small but I am not—as she is—deathly petty.

I think I will not even get out of bed until my lady stepgrandmother taps on my door and says: “We have a visitor. Will you not come out to my presence chamber, and see who has come to see you?”

“Who?” I ask sulkily, not stirring from the pillow.

She puts her head around the door with a little smile, the first I have seen for a month. “Sir Owen Hopton, Katherine’s keeper, has come to see you. He took Katherine’s boy Thomas Seymour to join his brother and grandmother at Hanworth. He took her wedding rings and messages to Ned Seymour. And now he has come to see you.”

I throw back the covers and jump down from the bed. My maid comes in behind my grandmother with my little gown and sleeves and hood. “Ask him to wait, I am coming,” I say.

My lady grandmother leaves me to hurry into my clothes and follow her into her presence chamber. A tall weary man is standing before her, his cap in one hand and a wineglass in another. On the floor near the door is a box and a tall muffled cage. He puts down the wine and the cap and bows as I come in, his hand on his heart.

“Lady Mary,” he says. “It is an honor.”

I recoil as he kneels to me as if I were a queen. “Please get up,” I say.

“I am so sorry for the news I bring,” he says, getting to his feet but stooping so that he can see my face. “I learned to love and revere your sister in the short time that my house was blessed with her presence. Both my wife and I were very grieved at her death. We would have done anything for her. Anything.”

I see that I have to put my own grief aside to answer him. The death of a princess is not the same as a private loss. “I understand,” I say. “I know you could have done nothing to save her.”