‘Can’t the doctors . . .?’

‘They wouldn’t even let her see a doctor for many years,’ Jane said irritably. ‘She could have died for want of care, not once but several times. The witch Boleyn wanted her dead and more than once I swear she sent poison. She has had a bitter life: half-prisoner, half-saint, always swallowing down grief and anger.’

* * *

The mornings were the best times for Lady Mary. After she had been to Mass and broken her fast she liked to walk, and often she chose me to walk with her. One warm day in late June she commanded me to walk at her side and to name the flowers and describe the weather in Spanish. I had to keep my steps short so that I did not stride ahead of her, and she often stopped with her hand to her side, the colour draining from her face. ‘Are you not well this morning, my lady?’ I asked.

‘Just tired,’ she said. ‘I did not sleep last night.’

She smiled at the concern on my face. ‘Oh, it is nothing worse than it has always been. I should learn to have more serenity. But not to know . . . and to have to wait . . . and to know that he is in the hands of advisors who have set their hearts . . .’

‘Your brother?’ I asked when she fell silent.

‘I have thought of him every day from the day he was born!’ she burst out passionately. ‘Such a tiny boy and so much expected of him. So quick to learn and so—I don’t know—so cold in his heart where he should have been warm. Poor boy, poor motherless boy! All three of us, thrown together, and none of us with a mother living, and none of us knowing what would happen next.

‘I had more care of Elizabeth than I did of him, of course. And now she is far from me, and I cannot even see him. Of course I worry about him: about what they are doing to his soul, about what they are doing to his body . . . and about what they are doing to his will,’ she added very quietly.

‘His will?’

‘It is my inheritance,’ she said fiercely. ‘If you report, as I imagine you do, tell them I never forget that. Tell them that it is my inheritance and nothing can change that.’

‘I don’t report!’ I exclaimed, shocked. It was true, I had sent no report, there was nothing in our dull lives and quiet nights to report to Lord Robert or his father. This was a sick princess on a knife blade of watching and waiting, not a traitor spinning plots.

‘Whether or no,’ she dismissed my defence, ‘nothing and no-one can deny me my place. My father himself left it to me. It is me and then it is Elizabeth. I have never plotted against Edward, though there were some who came to me and asked me in my mother’s name to stand against him. I know that in her turn Elizabeth will never plot against me. We are three heirs, taking precedence one after another to honour our father. Elizabeth knows that I am the next heir after Edward, he came first as the boy, I come second as the princess, the first legitimate princess. We all three will obey our father and we stand to inherit one after the other as my father commanded. I trust Elizabeth, as Edward trusts me. And since you promise that you don’t report, you can make this reply if anyone asks you: tell them that I will keep my inheritance. And tell them that this is my country.’