“More than that,” Edward says. “He is changing his mind. There are to be no more burnings for heresy. The mood of the country has turned against it, and the king has turned with them. He says that Anne Askew should have been pardoned, and that Anne Askew will be the last. This is your influence, Your Majesty, and everyone who wants to see the church reformed will be grateful to you. There are many who thank God for you. There are many who know that you are a scholar, a theologian, and a leader.”

“It’s too late for some,” I say quietly.

“Yes, but others are still in prison,” he says. “You could ask for their release.”

“He does not seek my advice,” I remind him.

“A woman like you can put a thought into her husband’s head and congratulate him for thinking it,” Edward says, smiling broadly. “You know how it is done. You are the only woman ever to manage it.”

I think that I started my reign as a scholar and learned how to study, and now I have become a whore and have learned whore’s tricks.

“It is not ignoble to humble yourself for a cause like this,” Edward says as if he knows what I am thinking. “The papists are in retreat, the king has turned against them. You could get good men released and the king to change the law to free people to pray as they wish. You have to work with your charm and your beauty—with the skills of Eve and the spirit of Our Lady. This is what it is to be a woman of power.”

“That’s odd, for I feel powerless,” I say.

“You must use what you have,” he says, the advice of a good man to a whore for time immemorial. “You must use what you are allowed.”

* * *

I take great care not to say one word that sounds like a challenge to the king. I ask him to explain his thinking on the significance of purgatory, and I am interested when he tells me that there is no evidence for such a state in the Bible and that the theory of purgatory was created by the church solely to finance chantries and Masses. I listen with the air of an eager disciple as he propounds things that I have thought ever since I began my studies. Now he is glancing into books that I have read and hidden for my own safety, and he tells me the things that strike him as if they are a great novelty and I should learn them from him. Little Lady Jane Grey knows these opinions, Princess Elizabeth has read them; I taught them both myself. But now I sit beside the king and exclaim when he describes the blindingly obvious, I admire his discovery of the widely known, and I remark on his perception.