“Mother,” she says again. “It’s supposed to be son against the father and the daughter against the mother, not mother-in-law. You got it wrong because you hate Lady Dudley. And that just shows you, Jane. This is not the Word of God. This is you trying to get your own back on the Dudleys. You hope that the queen will forgive you without you changing your faith, and then John Dudley, who died renouncing his faith, will look like a coward and a heretic and you will look braver than him.”

I flare with rage at her simplicity. “I am a martyr to your stupidity! You understand nothing. I am amazed that you know the Scripture, but you use it wrongly, to shake my confidence. Go now; and don’t come back.”

She turns to me and her blue eyes blaze with the Tudor temper. She has pride, just like me. “You don’t deserve my love for you,” she says, with her own silly logic. “But you have it anyway, when you least deserve it. Because I see the trouble you are in even if you are too clever to know.”

THE TOWER, LONDON,

FEBRUARY 1554

I had thought that the queen would release me for Christmas, but the twelve nights come and go and while the rest of the country is forced to celebrate the Lord’s birth with a Latin Mass, I praise Our Lord as a good Christian should, with prayers and reflections and no pagan bringing in of the green, no masquing or idolatry, no excess of drink or food. Indeed, I don’t think I have ever kept a Christmas so well before—my day was entirely devoted to prayer and meditating on the birth of my Savior, and reading my Bible. There were no presents and no feasting, and that is how I have always wanted to spend Christmas, and I have never been allowed this isolated purity before. I am so glad to be alone and fasting.

“But how completely miserable!” Katherine wails. She comes from our London house, with gifts from my mother and father, and a new hood from her own wardrobe. “Jane, couldn’t you get a bough of holly? Not even a Yule log in the fireplace?”

She releases a little tame robin that has come with her, and it perches on the empty stone lintel and trills, as if to complain that there is no greenery and no music.

I don’t even answer her; I just stare her down, until I see her lip tremble and she says feebly: “Surely, you must be so lonely?”

“I am not,” I say, though the truth is that I am.

“You must miss us, your sisters, even if you don’t miss our lady mother.”

“I have my studies.” But they don’t take the place of conversation, even the frivolous foolish conversation of ignorant girls.