Unbelievably, my mother—the most unlikely angel in the world—delivers a true miracle. She has been constantly attending court, begging the queen that we, the innocent victims of my father’s ambition, his surviving little family of three, be forgiven his treason. My lady mother pursues the queen’s goodwill as if it were a plump deer, and in the end brings it to bay and cuts its furry throat. Once Jane is gone and can no longer be the unwilling center of any rebellion, once my father is dead and buried, the queen gives us back one of our houses, Beaumanor, near Bradgate Park, and the whole beautiful park of Loughborough stocked with our game, and we are allowed to live richly once more.

“What about the bear?” I ask Mother when she tells me of this extraordinary reprieve.

“What bear?”

“The Bradgate bear. I was taming him. Will we move him to Beaumanor?”

“For God’s sake, we have been an inch from the scaffold and you are talking to me about a bear? We’ve lost him with Bradgate, and the hounds and the horses. They’ll all go to someone in the queen’s favor. My life is ruined, I am a heartbroken widow, and you talk to me about a bear?”

Jane would have stood up to her and insisted that the bear should come with us to Beaumanor. I can’t. I don’t have the words and I cannot tell her that I feel that the bear, like Mr. Nozzle, like every living thing, deserves to be seen and considered, is fit for love. I should like to tell her that I am heartbroken too; but I can’t find the words for this and she is, anyway, not interested.

“Go to the Herberts,” she snaps. “Fetch your things from them.”

BEAUMANOR, LEICESTERSHIRE,

SPRING 1554

I feel that we have got home safe, ducked our heads as the scythe passed over us. Mary and Mother and I, Mr. Nozzle and Ribbon the kitten, the horses and hounds (but not the bear) are home but not home, close to the park, near enough to see the tall chimneys of our old house, missing our old house—but at any rate alive, and living together in a state of constant mild bickering that tells us that we can speak, that we can hear, that we are safe.

And we are lucky—far luckier than the others. My father never comes home, I will never see my sister again. They bury her in pieces in the chapel, and Elizabeth our cousin enters the Tower as a prisoner suspected of treason in the rebellion led by Thomas Wyatt and my father. Only the queen can say if Elizabeth will come out or if more Tudor blood will water the green, and she is not telling. For sure, I will never go there if I can help it. Never. Never.