Of course the Howards, always quick to gobble up any advantage, had Mary Howard in their rooms ready for sale, and they visited the king before dinner was even served to ask for his permission for Thomas Seymour and Mary Howard to be married. The king saw them in his privy chamber where he was dining with a few lords and he agreed to the renewed proposal. While I was dining before the court in the great hall, doing my duty as queen, they were agreeing—Seymours and Howards—with the king that the marriage should go ahead. When I told Thomas that we were trapped like his drowning sailors, the king was drinking the health of the young couple.

Anne Seymour brings the gossip to the ladies” rooms. Her husband has told her that the king is pleased that the two great families of England will unite in marriage and content that his daughter-in-law shall remarry.

“Did you know, Your Majesty?” Anne Seymour asks me curiously. “Has His Majesty spoken with you?”

“No,” I say. “This is the first I have heard of it.”

Anne cannot hide her pleasure that she has this news before me, and I have to allow her the little triumph.

“Just as well,” Nan says to me as we go into my bedroom before the nighttime prayers.

“Just as well—what?” I say disagreeably as I sit down before the glass and look at my pale face.

“Just as well to get Mary Howard out of the way. The king has always liked her and they are a family with no feeling but ambition, and no scruples at all.”

“She is the widow of the king’s dead bastard son,” I say with assumed patience. “She is hardly likely to be a temptation to the king.”

“She is a beautiful girl and the Howards would propose their own grandmother to him if it suited their purpose,” Nan says, paying no attention to my ill humor. “If you had seen them with Anne Boleyn, if you had seen them with all the other Howard beauties—for Kitty Howard was only one of many—you would be glad to see Mary Howard safely settled.”

“Oh, I am,” I say coldly.

Nan waits as the maid lays my sleeves of gold brocade in the scented chest under the window. “You don’t mind for him?” she asks very quietly.

“Not at all,” I say clearly. “Not at all.”

* * *