As soon as the king can ride we go by stages to Cowdray House at Midhurst, hoping that one of the king’s most boastful courtiers, Sir Anthony Browne, can raise his spirits and comfort him. The king sits on his horse in silence, looking around him, looking everywhere at green fields, strips of crops, flocks of sheep, herds of cows, as if he can see nothing but the heeling over of his proud ship and the terrible gurgle in the water as she sailed downward to drown. I am beside him and I know that my face is frozen like a stone angel on a tomb. The country that we ride through is quiet, the people resentful. They know that the French nearly landed, that the royal fleet cannot defend them. This is a countryside of inlets and tidal rivers, terribly exposed to an invasion. They are afraid that the French will refit and come again, and there are many people who whisper that if the French came and restored the abbeys and the churches and the holy shrines, then they would be a blessing to England.

I do not ask about Thomas Seymour. I do not dare to say his name. I think if I say so much as “Thomas,” that I will cry out, and if I start, I will never be able to stop. I think there is a sea of tears in me as deep as the tides that sigh through the rigging of his ship.

“The king has granted Lady Carew a great pension,” Nan says quietly to me as she is brushing my hair before putting on my gold net and my hood.

“Lady Carew?” I ask indifferently.

“Her husband went down on the ship,” she says. Nobody says “Mary Rose” anymore. It is as if she is a ghost, another lost queen, a nameless woman missing from Henry’s court.

“Poor lady,” I say.

“The king made him vice admiral the very night before, and gave him the command,” she says. “He replaced Thomas Seymour, who was furious at the slight. He always had the luck of the devil, did Tom. He had to make another ship his flagship and he came through unscathed.”

She looks up from the work of twisting my hair into ringlets and tucking them into the net and sees my face in the mirror. “What’s the matter?” she asks. “Are you ill?”

I put my hand to my stomacher. I can feel my heart pound through the tightly laced silk. “I am sick,” I whisper. “Nan, I am terribly sick. Let me lie down for a moment.”