Anne Seymour and Catherine Brandon take up their sewing, but do not make so much as a stitch. I make no pretense of doing anything but listening. I fold my hands in my lap and Princess Elizabeth, sitting beside me, does the same, copying me exactly. Anne of Cleves sits beside her and puts her arm around Elizabeth’s narrow shoulders. I have to suppress a little pang of quite unworthy jealousy. Of course, she still thinks of herself as Elizabeth’s stepmother. She too cared for the motherless child. So does sin come into the smallest moments of daily life; but really, she was Elizabeth’s stepmother for no more than months!

The archbishop reads his list of proposed changes and his explanation. All the ritual of the church, which is nowhere described in the Bible, never required by Jesus, is to go. Curtseying to the cross, kneeling on command, all this must change. Old superstitions, like ringing a peal of bells on All-Hallows Eve to scare away bad spirits and welcome the good saints, is to stop. Statues in churches will be rigorously inspected to see that they have no popish tricks like moving eyes or bleeding wounds. No one is to pray to them as if they might intervene in day-to-day life, and they must remain uncovered during the season of Lent.

“The Bible tells us that Christ fasted in the wilderness,” Cranmer says reasonably. “That is all the model that we need to take for Lent.”

We agree. Even Princess Mary cannot defend the paganism of binding the statues’ eyes, or putting cloths over their heads.

Cranmer takes his changes to the king and then returns to my rooms elated.

“Stephen Gardiner is still in Bruges working on the Spanish treaty, and so the king had no contrary voice urging him to the old ways,” he says, delighted. “There was no one there to accuse me of wrong thinking. The Howards didn’t like it but the king is tired of them. He listened without argument. He was interested; indeed, he even suggested some more reforms to me himself.”

“He did?” Anne of Cleves asks, following the rapid talk.

“Yes, indeed.”

“I thought that he might,” says Catherine Brandon. “He spoke to me about the danger of setting up a graven image. He thinks the people do not understand that the cross and the statues in church are there to represent God. They are signs, not objects of faith. They are not things to be worshipped for themselves.”

Without turning her head so much as an inch, Anne of Cleves slides her eyes towards mine to see if I have observed that Catherine Brandon is in the king’s confidence, and that he talks to her about religious reform. Anne of Cleves saw her maid-in-waiting pretty Kitty Howard dancing attendance on the king, absent without permission from the queen’s rooms. Now her sidelong glance asks me: Is it the same for you?