Princess Mary throws me a brief glance and says nothing, and then the court falls silent as we wait for the king to speak. We wait, and we wait, Nicholas de Vent turning his cap in his hand, sweating with nerves to see what the great patron of art, Holbein’s patron, has to say about this production, this painted lie, this masterpiece of self-aggrandizement, this grave robbing.

“I like it,” Henry says firmly, and there is a sort of breeze as the court releases its indrawn breath. “Very fair. Very well done.” He glances at me and I see he looks just a little embarrassed. “You will be glad to see the children painted all together, and the honor that I have done to Edward’s mother.”

He looks at the pale painted face of his dead wife. “She might have sat beside me, just like that, had she had been spared,” he says. “She might have seen Edward grow to be a man. Who knows? She might have given me more sons.”

There is nothing I can say while my husband publicly mourns a previous wife, gazing into her bleached stupid face as if to find some wit now that escaped everyone during her life. I find that my teeth are gritted to hold a fixed smile as if this is not an insult to me, as if I am not publicly denied, as if the king is not telling the world that all of us who came after Jane—Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, me—are ghost queens of less substance than her, the dead wife.

Of course, it is Anne Seymour, the dead queen’s sister-in-law, who steps forward and addresses the king as a kinswoman and fellow mourner, taking advantage of his tears as she always does: “It is her to the life.”

Except she is dead.

“Just as she was,” he says.

I doubt that, for she is in my best gold-heeled shoes.

“She must be looking down from heaven and blessing you and her boy,” she says.

“She must be,” he agrees eagerly.

I note, dryly, that the sainted Jane seems to have skipped purgatory, though there is a preacher imprisoned in the Tower of London right now facing a charge of heresy for suggesting that purgatory does not exist.

“She was cruelly taken from me,” he says, his little eyes blinking out easy tears. “And we had been married little more than a year.”

He’s not quite right. I could tell him exactly. They were married for a year and four months, a shorter marriage even than Kitty Howard, who lasted only a year and six months before he beheaded her; but far longer than his marriage to Anne of Cleves, now so well regarded, who was pushed out inside half a year.

“She loved you so much,” Anne Seymour says mournfully. “But thank God that she left such a wonderful son as her living memorial.”