The visit goes off just as we planned it. Prince Edward rides out with an escort of gentlemen and yeomen of the guard, all dressed in cloth of gold. He looks very small with the great yeomen towering over him, but he handles his little horse well and he greets the visitors with dignity in perfect French. I am so proud of his scholarship that I hug him on his return and dance him around my private chamber.

I report on his good behavior to the king, and Henry says that he will meet the admiral himself, and take him to Mass in the chapel royal.

“You have served me and my family well today,” Henry says to me when I go to his room in the evening to tell him of the visit and the ceremonies, of how well Prince Edward acted as host in his father’s absence, of how proud we must be of Jane Seymour’s boy. “You have been as a mother to him,” the king says. “Far more than his own mother, who never even knew him.”

I notice that tonight he speaks of her death as a dereliction of her duty. “You have been as a regent to the country today. I am grateful to you.”

“I have done nothing more than I should,” I coo.

“I am glad that you are pictured with him in the family portrait,” he says. “It is right that you are honored as his stepmother.”

I hesitate. Clearly, he has forgotten that it is Jane Seymour, the dead wife, who is in the portrait. I sat for it, but I did not get my face in the frame. There is no portrait of me together with the little boy whom I love.

He continues, regardless. “You have been an honor to your country and to your beliefs,” he says. “You have quite persuaded me over these last few months of the rightness of your place at the head of the country and of your convictions.”

I glance around the room. There is no one here to disagree. The usual courtiers are in earshot but now they are almost all friendly to me or to the cause of reform. Stephen Gardiner is absent. There was some argument over a small estate of land and the king took sudden offense. Gardiner will have to wheedle his way back into favor, but in the meantime, it is a pleasure to be without him. Wriothesley has not been at the king’s side since the day in the garden when he came to arrest me.

“I am always guided by Your Majesty,” I say.

“And I think you are right about the Mass,” he says casually. “Or do you call it the Communion?”

I smile, pretending confidence while I feel the ground shuddering and weakening beneath me. “I call it whatever Your Majesty thinks best,” I say. “It is your church, it is your liturgy. You know better than I, better than anyone, how it should be understood.”