I just look at her, aghast. “What?”

She looks back at me. “I have to go, too,” she says.

Obviously, she has to obey her young husband and his all-powerful father.

“You can’t.”

“Can we ask someone?”

She is so ridiculous. “Ask who? Ask them what?”

“What we should do? Could we send a message and ask Roger Ascham?”

“The scholar? What do you think he could do? Now that my Privy Council is running away with your father-in-law, and proclaiming a papist as queen?”

“I don’t know,” she snivels.

Of course she doesn’t. She never knows anything.

“Father has to tell them,” she says in a whisper. “The Privy Council. Father must tell them not to come to Baynard’s Castle and turn against you. I can’t.”

“Well, tell him to tell them! Fetch him here now!”

“He won’t. I already asked. Our lady mother won’t.”

We are silent for a moment, more like sisters than we have ever been before, united in apprehension as it dawns on me that the right thing does not always happen, that the saints do not always march unstoppably to heaven, that the godly do not necessarily triumph, that the two of us have no more authority than little Mary. The monkey, Mr. Nozzle, pulls her handkerchief from her pocket and presses it into her hand.

“What about me?” I ask.

I see for the first time that there are tears in her eyes. “I don’t suppose you could come, too?” she says. “Come to Baynard’s Castle with everybody?” She gives a gulp. “Say you’re sorry to Lady Mary? That it was a mistake? Come with me?”

“Don’t be stupid,” I say harshly.

“If you and I were to say it was all a mistake? If I were to back you up and say you didn’t mean it? That they made you?”

I see her tighten her hold on the jacket of her pet monkey, as if he might give witness, too.

“Impossible.”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t think you could,” she says, and hands me her damp handkerchief and goes without another word from the room.

I look around me. Now I see that some of my ladies are missing and now I realize they have been absent since prayers this morning. My rooms are thinning out; people are deserting me.