“Look at these earrings!” someone exclaims, but instead I turn away and go to the window to look down on the formal gardens and the glimpse of the silvery river through the trees. I am suddenly sickened. “Those are dead women’s goods,” I say unsteadily as Nan comes to my side. “They are the favorite treasures of dead queens. Those necklaces have been around the necks of the wife before me, some of them have been worn by every one of them who has gone before me. The pearls were warmed by their dead skins, the silver is tarnished by their old sweat.”

Nan is as pale as me. She wrapped Katherine Howard’s emeralds in their leather folders and put them in that very jewel box on the day of her arrest. She fastened Jane Seymour’s sapphires around her neck on her wedding day. She handed Katherine of Aragon her earrings and here they are now, on the table in my privy chamber for my use.

“You are the queen, you get the queen’s treasures,” she rules, but her voice trembles. “Of course. It’s how it has to be.”

There is a rap on the door and the guard swings it open. William Herbert, Nan’s husband, comes into the room and smiles to see us all surrounded by jewels like children amazed in the pastry kitchen, spoiled for choice. “His Majesty sent this,” he says. “It was overlooked. He says I am to put it on your beloved head.”

As I rise to my feet and come towards my brother-in-law, I see he cannot meet my eyes. He looks at the window behind me, at the sky scudding with clouds; he does not look at the treasures at my feet as I step carefully around Katherine of Aragon’s hoods, Katherine Howard’s glossy black sables. In his hand is a small heavy box.

“What’s this?” I ask him. I think at once—I don’t want it.

In reply he bows, and unlocks the metal hasp. He lifts the lid and it falls back on its bronze hinges. There is a small ugly crown inside. The ladies behind me gasp. I see Nan make a little movement as if she would prevent what must come next.

William puts down the box and lifts out the elaborately worked crown, encrusted with pearls and sapphires. Mounted at the pinnacle, as if it were a domed church, is a plain gold cross.

“The king wants you to try it on.”

Obediently, I bend my head for Nan to remove my hood, and her husband gives her the crown. It is the right size, it settles on my forehead like a headache.

“Is it new?” I ask faintly. I long for it to be newly made for me.

He shakes his head.

“Whose was it?”

Nan makes a little gesture with her hand as if to warn him to be silent.

“It was Anne Boleyn’s crown,” he tells me. I feel it pressing down on my head as if I might sink beneath the weight of it.