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.”

“Let’s call it the Communion then, the Communion for all the people of the church,” he says, suddenly expansive. “Let us say that it is not literally the body and blood of Our Lord—for how are the common people to understand such a thing? They will think we mean some magic or some trickery. To those of us who think deeply, who meditate on these things, we who understand the power of language, it may be the body and the blood as well as bread and wine; but to the ordinary people we can say to them that it is a form of words. Likewise also when they had supped he took the cup saying: This cup is the new testament in my blood which shall for you be shed. It is clear that He gave them bread, He blessed bread, He gave them wine and told them it was a testament. We, who understand so much more than the village dullards, should not muddle them and confuse them.”