There are to be two hundred French gentlemen and the whole of the Privy Council and the court will come to meet them. We will house them in tents of cloth of gold in the gardens and we will build temporary banqueting houses for the feasts. We draw this little village on our plan, and we take another piece of paper and list the ten days and every reception, hunt, masque, sport, and feast.

Princess Elizabeth is there too, and Lady Jane, and we laugh and call for bonnets and headgear and soon we are play-acting the arrival of the French. Edward plays himself but all the rest of us are Frenchmen and courtiers in great hats, sweeping exaggerated bows and making long speeches until we fail the masque with our laughter and have to be ourselves again.

“But it will be like this?” Edward asks earnestly. “And I will stand just here?” He points at the platform that we have marked on the plan.

“Why worry?” Elizabeth demands of him. “You’re the prince and our Lady Mother is regent—whatever the two of you choose to do must be how it is to be done. You’re Prince of Wales, you cannot do anything wrong.”

Edward gives me his sweetest smile. “I shall follow you, Lady Mother.”

“You are the prince,” I say. “And Elizabeth is correct. Whatever you do is the right thing.”

* * *

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.”