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.

“Surely he doesn’t want me to wear it today,” I say awkwardly.

“He’ll tell you when,” he says. “Important feast days or when you are meeting foreign ambassadors.”

I nod, my neck stiff, and Nan takes it off for me and puts it back in the box. She closes the lid as if she does not want to see it. Anne Boleyn’s crown? How can it be anything but cursed?

“But I’m to take back the pearls,” William says, embarrassed. “They were brought in error.”

“Which pearls?” Nan asks her husband.

He looks at her, still carefully not looking at me. “The Seymour pearls,” he says quietly. “They’re to be kept in the treasure room.”

Nan bends down and picks up the ropes and ropes of pearls, milky and glowing in her hands, and piles them back in their long box, the strands running up and down the length of it like a quiescent snake. She hands them to William and smiles at me. “It’s not as if we didn’t have a fortune in pearls already,” she says, trying to cover the awkward moment.

I walk with William to the doorway. “Why is he taking them back?” I ask him in an undertone.