The thought of someone planning unhappiness for Thomas is like a physical blow. I know what shame is. I would never want Thomas to feel it. “I don’t think much of it at all. But what did they mean to do?”

“They were going to marry him, and make him ask you if she could be one of your ladies-in-waiting. He was to bring her to court. And what do you think she was to do then?”

Slowly, a plot is unfolding. I think: How vile these people are, these sneakbills. “I would have granted her a place with me, of course. A Howard girl, a Seymour wife could not have been refused.” And, I think, I would have done anything to bring Thomas to court so that I could see him. Even if it meant spending every day with his wife. Even that. They would have drawn me in to hurt him. They would have used me to hurt him.

“They were planning to put Mary Howard in the king’s path.” She draws back and looks at me. “They planned that she should supplant you.”

“How would she supplant me?” I ask coldly.

“She was to flirt with the king, to lead him on, to seduce him. She was to lie with him or do whatever he can still do. She was to be his maîtresse en titre, as grand as a French mistress, a whore above all others. They said they could secure that, for certain. You would be all but cast aside and she would be preferred. You would go and live somewhere else, she would rule the court. But they said that if she was clever, there would be more for her than that, something better than that.”

“What could be better than that?” I ask, as if I don’t know.

“They said that if she were clever and desirable and spoke to him sweetly and did as they taught her, that he would get rid of you and marry her. And then she would guide him back to the old religion and her court would be a center of theology. Like yours, but better, they said: they meant papist. And that when he died she would be stepmother to Prince Edward, and the Duke of Norfolk would be lord protector and rule the kingdom until the prince came of age, and then rule him by force of habit. She would bring the king back to the Church of Rome, he would restore the church and the monasteries in England, and she would be dowager queen over a papist kingdom.”

Anne breaks off, her face bright, looking at me with a mixture of horror and scandalized delight.

“But the king is her father-in-law,” I object quietly. “She was married to his son. How could they think she might marry him?”