“I’m not like Kitty Howard!” I exclaim in a rush of sudden temper. “I am the sixth wife, the sixth disregarded wife, not the fifth guilty wife. All I have done is to study and listen to preachers. She was an adulteress, or perhaps a bigamist, and a whore! Any mother would take her daughter away from service to a young woman like that! Any mother would fear the morals in a court like that! But everyone says that my court is the most virtuous of any in Christendom! Why would anyone take their daughter away from me?”

“Kitty’s maids left in the days before she was arrested,” Nan says levelly, not responding to my anger. “Not because she was light, but because she was doomed. Nobody wants to be in the court of a falling queen.”

“A falling queen?” I repeat. I hear the words: it sounds like a comet, like something in the night sky. “A falling queen.”

“William told me that you opened the window and let your birds fly away,” she remarks.

“Yes.”

“I’ll go and close it again, and call them back if I can. There’s no point in showing that we are afraid.”

“I’m not afraid!” I lie.

“You should be.”

* * *

As I lead my ladies in to dinner I look around as if I fear that the court too will be slipping away. But I cannot see any absences. Everyone is there, in their accustomed places. Those who believe in reform do not feel they are newly endangered, it is only those of my household, those who are close to me. Everyone bows respectfully and deeply as I go by. It seems as if nothing is changed from every other night. The king’s place is laid, the cloth of state hangs over his great reinforced chair, the servers bow as they come into the room and present the finest dishes to his empty throne as ritual demands. He will dine in his own rooms with his new circle of favorites: Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley, Sir Richard Rich, Sir Anthony Denny, William Paget. When dinner is over, I may leave the great hall to sit with the king in his rooms, but until then there must be someone at the head table. The court needs a monarch, the princesses need a parent to dine with them.

My gaze goes across the room and I note that the Seymour household has an empty place laid at the head of the table. I glance at Anne. “Is Edward coming home?” I ask.

“I wish to God he was here,” she says bluntly. “But I don’t expect him. He doesn’t dare leave Boulogne: the place would fall in a moment.” She follows my gaze. “That place will be for Thomas.”

“Oh?”