She gives me a sweet respectful smile. “I doubt it, Your Majesty, for I had to learn from my Bible when I was blessed with it, and I had it snatched from my hands many a time. I had to fight for my understanding. But I expect that you all have been given a Bible and taught by the finest scholars.”

“Her Majesty is writing her own book,” Nan interrupts boastfully. “The king has asked her to translate prayers from the Latin to give to the people. She works with the king himself. She studies with the great scholar Thomas Cranmer. Together, they are working on an English missal.”

“It is true then?” she demands of me. “We will hear the prayers in English in the churches? We will be allowed to know what the priest has been saying for all these years?”

“Yes.”

“God be praised,” she says simply. “You are blessed to be doing such work.”

“It is the king who gives the liturgy to his people,” I say. “And Thomas Cranmer who translates it. I have just helped.”

“I shall be so glad to read the prayers,” she says fervently. “And God will be glad to hear them, as He must hear the prayers of all of the people, in whatever language they speak, even when they are silent.”

I cannot help but be intrigued. “Do you think that God, who gave us the Word, understands without words? Beyond words?”

“He must do,” she says. “He understands my thoughts, even when they are in my mind before I have put words to them. He understands my prayers when they are nothing more than a wordless calling to Him, like a hen clucking back to a poultry woman.” She corrects herself. “A sparrow does not fall but He knows it; He must understand what a sparrow feels. He must know what I mean when I go chuck chuck chuck. He must understand parables and simple stories since His own Son spoke in parables and simple stories, in whatever language they had in Bethlehem.”

I smile but I am impressed. I had not thought of the language of God as the language before words, as the language spoken in the heart, and I like the thought of God understanding our prayers as if we were clucking hens, pecking at His feet. “And did you come to this understanding through private study?” I ask. “Were you taught at home?”