“Now look what you’ve started!” Guildford whispers furiously to me. “You’re such a fool! I am your husband! Why wouldn’t you crown me? I am your master, you have sworn to obey me, how can I be anything less than a king when you are queen? And now look! You have upset my mother.”

“I can’t help that! I have prayed on this, Guildford. God has called me to this great place. I don’t want it, but I can see that He has called me to test my faith. But He has not called you. He did not call you. You are not the heir: I am.”

White with rage, he cannot find the words to answer me. “Disobedient wife!” he spits at me. “Unnatural! That is treason alone! Never mind the rest of it!”

“Don’t say that word!” his mother hisses at him as he turns on his heel and flings himself from the room. She gives him a furious look and rushes after him. I am left trembling with temper and distress, the open box with Anne Boleyn’s crown on the table before me and my sister, wide-eyed, staring at me.

The Marquess of Winchester, who started all this with his foolish promise of a crown for Guildford, turns to my uncle Henry FitzAlan the Earl of Arundel, and William Herbert, Katherine’s father-in-law, raising his eyebrows as if to ask how the country is to be ruled by a warring family. “I thought all this had been agreed?” he asks slyly.

“It is agreed,” Katherine’s father-in-law says swiftly. He, for one, wants no difficulties; this is his plot too. His son, at his side, nods as if he knows anything about it.

“It was not agreed by me,” I say. I suddenly feel the hand of God spread over me, I suddenly know my own mind. I am not a fool and I know the right thing to do here. I am no longer drowning in fear; I can see my way. “I will accept the crown, since it is God’s will that I should, since I can do God’s work. But there is no such destiny for Guildford. It is I who inherit the crown from King Edward, God bless him, and Guildford, my husband, takes the throne at my side.”

I sense, rather than see, that my sister Katherine has drawn a little closer, as if to say that she is here as my heir, that we are the girls of royal blood who are named to inherit. We are not fools or pawns. My husband will not be crowned king; her husband will not be crowned king.

“But he has to have a title,” Katherine’s father-in-law remarks thoughtfully. “A royal title. After all...”