“Fetch my wife,” John Dudley says quietly to the man at the door, and we wait in awkward silence. Nobody meets my gaze but everyone is looking at me. I keep thinking: what do they want me to do? I say a little prayer: “Holy Father, tell me what to do. Send me a sign.” Then my mother-in-law, Lady Dudley, comes in and my mother is with her. This should comfort me but seeing those two rivalrous enemies united in a sudden determination frightens me worse than before. Elizabeth Parr comes in too and stands beside her husband the Marquess of Northampton, and her face is bright and hard.

My mother takes my cold hands in an unkind grip. “Jane, the king my cousin is dead,” she says loudly, as if announcing her royal blood to the room.

“Edward dead?”

“Yes, and he named you as the new queen.” She can’t stop herself from adding: “Through my right.”

“Poor Edward! Oh! Edward!” I say. “Was it peaceful for him at the end? Was it his illness? Did he have a preacher with him?”

“Doesn’t matter,” my mother-in-law says, wasting no time on the soul of my cousin. “He named you as queen.”

I look into her determined face. “I can’t be,” I say simply.

“You are,” my mother repeats. “At the end, he named our line. You inherit through me.”

“But what about Princess Mary?”

“She was named as a bastard by her own father in his will, and besides, we will never accept a papist queen,” Lady Dudley interrupts. “Never.”

“Princess Elizabeth?” I whisper.

This time, neither of them troubles to reply. I don’t even name Mary Queen of Scots, though her claim is as good as ours.

“I can’t do it,” I whisper to Lady Dudley, and I look askance at the room filled with men. “I really can’t.”

“You have to.”

One by one the councillors drop to their knees till they are all at the height of my shoulders and I feel as if I am besieged by determined gnomes, no taller than my little sister.

“Don’t!” I say miserably. “My lords, I beg you, don’t.” I can feel the tears running down my face, for my poor cousin, dead so young, and for me, alone in this terrible room with these terrifying men on their knees, and these women who will not help me. “Don’t, I can’t do it.”