“Thank God for him,” Anne Askew says fervently. “Do you think he will allow the Bible back into the churches again for everyone to read?”

“I am certain of it,” I say. “For since he has commissioned a translation of the Mass, he is bound to want the Bible to be read to the people in English, and the Bible will be restored to the churches once more.”

“Amen,” Anne Askew says. “And my work will be done. For all I ever do is recite the words of the Bible that I have memorized, and explain what the words mean. Half the gospelers in London are nothing more than speaking Bibles. If the Bible were allowed back into the churches, we would all be at peace. If the people can read it for themselves again, it will be like the feeding of the multitude. It will be a miracle of our age.”

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

AUTUMN 1545

We come to Whitehall as the weather turns cold and the frost in the garden makes the yew trees in the allées silvery white on the tips of their branches and green and dark in their shades. The bowls of the fountains are skinned with ice, and I order all the furs to be brought from the wardrobe rooms at my house, Baynard’s Castle. Once again they drape Kitty Howard’s sables around my neck, but this year I find that they are scented with my perfume and the ghost of the girl queen is gone into the cold twilight.

Nicholas de Vent has completed his great portrait of the five of us and it is waiting for its formal unveiling, fixed in its place, just as we specified that it should be, shrouded in a cloth of gold. Nobody has seen it since it left his studio; we are waiting for the king to announce that he wants to see it.

“Will Your Majesty come and unveil the portrait?” Anne Seymour asks me. “His Majesty asked my lord husband to escort you.”

“Now?” I ask. I am reading a book, as simple as a child’s primer, that explains the mystery of the Mass, the reality of purgatory. It is a book approved by the Privy Council and it is written in exactly their pompous tone of certainty. I close it, and wonder how it is that men, even thoughtful men, can sound as if they never consider anything but always simply know.

“Yes, now,” she says. “The painter is here; everyone is gathering.”

“Is the king coming?”

“His Majesty is resting,” she says. “His leg is bad. He says he will see it later.”