I shrug. “Her ladyship thought I was the heroine of a fairy tale,” I say irritably. She was one of those who sees me as a queen of ballads. A tragic queen with a beautiful childhood in France and then a lonely widowhood in Scotland. A balladeer would describe me married to the beautiful weakling Darnley, but longing for a strong man to rescue me. A troubadour would describe me as doomed from the moment of my birth, a beautiful princess born under a dark star. It doesn’t matter. People always make up stories about princesses. It comes to us with the crown. We have to carry it as lightly as we can. If a girl is both beautiful and a princess, as I have been all my life, then she will have adherents who are worse than enemies. For most of my life I have been adored by fools and hated by people of good sense, and they all make up stories about me in which I am either a saint or a whore. But I am above these judgments, I am a queen. “I expect no sympathy from her ladyship,” I say bitterly. “She is my cousin the queen’s most trusted servant, as is the earl. Otherwise we would not be housed by them. I am sure she is hopelessly prejudiced against me.”

“A staunch Protestant,” Mary warns me. “Brought up in the Brandon family, companion to Lady Jane Grey, I am told. And her former husband made his fortune from the ruin of the monasteries. They say that every bench in her house is a pew.”

I say nothing, but the small incline of my head tells her to go on.

“That husband served Thomas Cromwell in the Court of Augmentations,” she continues softly, “and made a fortune.”

“There would be a great profit in the destruction of the religious houses and the shrines,” I say thoughtfully. “But I thought it was the king who took the profit.”

“They say that Bess’s husband took his fee for the work, and then some more,” she whispers. “He took bribes from the monks to spare their houses or to undervalue them. That he took a fee for winking when treasure was smuggled out. But then he went back later and threw them out anyway and took all the treasure they thought they had saved.”

“A hard man,” I observe.