“Well, God be praised,” Nan says. “Just think if this country were to come to a true faith based on the Bible, not a hodgepodge of superstition based on spells and images and chants.”

“Indulgences,” Catherine says. She almost shudders with disdain. “That’s what I hate most. D’you know that the day after my lord died some damned priest came to me and said that for fifty nobles he could guarantee Charles’s ascent to heaven and would show me a sign that it was so?”

“What sign?” I ask curiously.

Catherine shrugs: “Who knows? I didn’t even ask. I am sure he could have given me anything that I would wish: a bleeding statue saved from some wrecked abbey? A portrait of the Madonna that spurts milk? It is such an insult to suggest that a man’s soul should be saved by half a dozen vile old men bawling out a psalm. How can anyone ever have believed it? How can anyone suggest it now that they can read the Bible and know that we get to heaven through faith alone?”

There is a tap on the door, the guards swing it open, and in walks Anne Askew, as trim and as pretty as if she had just come from the seamstress. She steps in, a gleeful little smile on her face, and dips a deep curtsey to me.

“God bless us!” Nan exclaims and, forgetting herself completely, crosses herself as if she were seeing a ghost.

“You’re a welcome stranger!” I say. “It’s a long time since we saw you! I was glad to know you were safe, that Bishop Bonner had released you, but we heard he sent you home. I didn’t think to see you again at court.”

“Oh, yes, I was sent home to my husband,” she says, quite matter-of-fact. “And I thank Your Majesty for letting it be known that I am under your protection. You saved me from more questioning, and a trial, I know. They did send me home to my husband, I was paroled into his keeping, but I have left him again and here I am.”

I smile at the boldness of the young woman. “Mistress Anne, you make it sound easy.”

“As easy as sin,” she says cheerfully. “But it is not sin, I promise you. My husband knows nothing of me, nor of my faith. I am as strange to him as a deer in the sheep pen. There is no way that we could marry in the sight of God and no way that such vows could be binding. He thinks as I do, though he has not the courage to say it to the bishop. He does not want me in his home, any more than I can tolerate being there. We cannot be yoked together—a deer and a sheep.”