Nan gets to her feet, alert as a yeoman of the guard. “But should you be here?” she asks. “You cannot bring heresy to the queen’s rooms. You cannot come here if you have been ordered to stay with your husband, whether he is a sheep and you a deer or both of you a pair of fools.”

Anne puts out her hand to halt Nan’s anxious torrent of words. “I would never bring danger to Her Majesty’s door,” she says calmly. “I know who I have to thank for my release. I owe you a debt for life,” she adds with a little curtsey to me. Then she turns back to Nan. “They were satisfied with my answers. They questioned me over and over but I did not say a word that was not in the Bible and they had no handle to hold me, nor rope to hang me.”

Nan hides an involuntary shudder at the mention of the hangman and glances towards me. “Bishop Bonner has no complaint against you?” she repeats incredulously.

Anne lets out a ringing, confident laugh. “That’s a man who would always be complaining about something. But there was nothing he could fix on me. The Lord Mayor asked me did I think the Host was holy, and I did not answer, because I know that it is illegal to speak of the bread of the Mass. He asked me if a mouse ate the Host would the mouse be holy? I just said, ‘Alack, poor mouse.’ That was the best of his questions: trying to trap me with a holy mouse!”

Despite myself I cannot help but laugh, and Catherine Brandon catches my eye and she giggles.

“Anyway, thank God that they released you, and obeyed the queen,” Catherine says, recovering. “We are winning the argument, almost everyone is persuaded by the queen’s thinking. The king listens to her, and the whole court thinks as we do.”

“And the queen has translated a book of prayers that have come out under her own name,” Nan says proudly.

Anne turns her brown gaze to me. “Your Majesty, this is to use your education and your position for the good of all true believers, and especially for the good of women. To be a woman and to write! To be a woman and to publish!”

“She is the first,” Nan boasts. “The first woman to publish in England, the very first woman to publish in the English language, the first to be named on the title page.”

“Hush,” I say. “There are many scholars like me, and many better read. There have been women writers before me. But I am blessed with a husband who allows me to study and write, and we are all blessed with a king who allows the prayers of the church to be understood by his people.”