“What’s that?”

“This is fresh rue,” she says. “You drink a tea made from it after he has had you. Every time. It prevents a child before it is even formed.”

I don’t take the little purse she holds out to me. I put out one finger and poke it.

“This is a sin,” I say uncertainly. “It must be a sin. This is the sort of rubbish that the old women peddle behind the hiring fair. It probably doesn’t even work.”

“It’s a sin to walk knowingly towards your own destruction,” she corrects me. “And you will do that if you don’t prevent a conception. If you give birth to a monster, as Queen Anne did, he will name you as a witch and kill you for it. His pride won’t allow him another dead baby. Everyone would know it was a fault in him if another wife, his sixth healthy wife, birthed a monster or lost a baby. Think! It would be his ninth loss.”

“Eight dead babies?” I can see a family of ghosts, a nursery of corpses.

She nods in silence and holds out the purse of rue. In silence, I take it.

“They say it smells awful. We’ll get the maid to bring you a jug of hot water in the morning, and brew it ourselves, alone.”

“This is terrible,” I say quietly. “I’ve given up my own desires”—I have a pulse like a stab of lust in the belly when I think of my own desires—“and now you—my own sister—give me poison to drink.”

She lays her warm cheek to mine. “You have to live,” she says with quiet passion. “Sometimes, at court, a woman has to do anything to survive. Anything. You have to survive.”

* * *

There is plague in the City of London and the king rules that our wedding shall be small and private with no crowds of common people that might bring infections. It will not take place in a great ceremony in the abbey, the fountains are not going to flow with wine, the people are not to roast oxen and dance in the streets. They are to take physic and stay in their homes, and nobody is allowed to come from the pestilential city to the clean river and the green meadows of the countryside around Hampton Court.

This, my third wedding, is to take place in the queen’s oratory, a small, beautifully decorated room off the queen’s chambers. I remind myself that this will be my private chapel, just off my closet, where I will be able to meditate and pray alone when this is all over. Once I have said my vows this very room—and all the others on the queen’s side—will be mine, for my exclusive use.