“They wouldn’t care about that!” Anne exclaims. “Don’t you think that the pope would give them a dispensation? If the bride was bringing England back to Rome? They’re devils, they care for nothing but stealing the king back to their side.”

“Indeed, I think they must be,” I say quietly. “If this is true. And did they think what would happen to me when pretty Mary Howard was in the king’s bed?”

She shrugs. Her gesture says: What d’you think happens to unwanted queens in this England? “I suppose they thought that you might accept a divorce, or they might charge you with heresy and treason.”

“I would die?” I ask. Even now, even after being queen for nearly three and a half years, walking through danger for all that time, I find it impossible to realize that anyone who knows me, who sees me at dinner every day, who has kissed my hand and promised loyalty, could coolly plot my death, and conspire to have me killed.

“It was Norfolk who named you as a disciple of Anne Askew,” she says. “That was to call you a heretic, that’s an offense that carries the penalty of death. It was he who worked with Gardiner to turn the king against you, calling you a serpent. This is not a man who sticks at trifles.”

“Trifles?”

“The death of a woman is a trifle to a man like the duke. You know it was he who passed the death sentence on both his nieces? He plotted that they be queen and when it went wrong, he sent them to the scaffold to save himself.”

Women’s lives do not matter to anyone at this court. Before every queen stands her pretty successor, behind her a ghost.

“So what is happening now?”

“The king is taking advice from us Seymours,” she says, unable to hide her rising pride. “Thomas and Edward are with the king now. I expect they will tell me what is happening when they come here before dinner, and then I will be able to tell you.”

“I am sure the king will tell me himself,” I say, to remind her that I am Queen of England and the king’s wife, newly restored to favor. Otherwise she will think of me as the Howards do, as the court does: a temporary occupant of the throne of queen, a woman who might be divorced or killed on a whim.

* * *