Nan is waiting with Joan at the door, which opens before us. “Come on,” I say to her. “I think there are some things you’ll want to see in my chambers.”

* * *

My own presence chamber is already filled with people come to congratulate me on my wedding and hoping to ask me for a place or a favor or an audience or a fee. I walk through them with a smile to one side and the other, without pausing. I will start my work as queen today. But right now, I want to see my husband’s gifts.

“Oh, my,” Nan says as the guards throw open the double doors to my private rooms and my ladies rise to their feet and gesture, rather helplessly, to the half a dozen boxes that the king’s men have put all around the room, the great keys ready in the locks.

It is a sin to feel this leap of cupidity. I laugh at myself. “Stand back!” I say jokingly. “Stand back, for I am about to dive into treasure.”

Nan turns the key to the first chest and we together lift the heavy lid. It is a traveling chest and it holds the gold plates and goblets for the queen’s private tables. I nod to two of the maids-in-waiting to come forward. They unpack one glorious plate after another and tip the reflections so the golden lights dance around the room like mad angels. “More!” I say, and now everyone holds a plate and shines it into each other’s eyes and flashes discs of light into every corner of the room until the room is dappled with shifting reflections. I laugh with delight and we shine the gold plates on one another, rise up, dance, and the whole room is dancing with us, filled with dazzling light.

“What’s next?” I demand breathlessly, and Nan opens the next chest. This is filled with necklaces and belts. She draws out ropes of pearls and belts embroidered and encrusted with sapphires, rubies, emeralds, diamonds, and stones that I cannot even name, sparkling dark beauties set in thick blocks of silver or gold. She spreads chains of gold on the arms of chairs, necklaces of silver and diamonds in the laps of the maids so that they dazzle against rich fabric. There are opals with their soft milky light gleaming in green and peach, there is amber in great chunks of dark orange, and there are handfuls of uncut stones in purses looking like pebbles, hiding the flash of precious light within their rocky depths.

Nan opens another chest that has been carefully packed with rolls of the softest leather. Out come rings heavy with precious stones, and single stones on long chains. Without comment, she lays before me Katherine of Aragon’s famous necklace of plaited gold. Another purse is undone and there are Anne Boleyn’s rubies. The royal jewels of Spain come from one great box, the dowry of Anne of Cleves is spread on the floor at my feet. The treasure that the king showered on Katherine Howard comes in a chest all to itself, untouched since she was stripped of everything and went out to take the axe on her bare neck.