“For remembrance of her,” William tells me. “She gave him his son. He wants to keep them for the prince’s future wife. He doesn’t want anyone else wearing them.”

“Of course, of course,” I say quickly. “Tell him how pleased I am with everything else. I know that her pearls were special.”

“He is at prayer,” my brother-in-law says. “He is hearing a Mass for her now.”

Carefully, I maintain my expression of sympathy and interest. The belief that God will shorten the days that a soul waits to enter heaven if He is offered a hundred Masses, a thousand prayers, bonfires of incense, was dismissed by this king, and the chantries closed. Even the chapel that he dedicated to pray for Jane’s soul was abolished; I didn’t know that he still clung to a belief that he has forbidden to the rest of us—the hope of praying someone out of purgatory.

“Stephen Gardiner is holding a special Mass for Queen Jane,” William tells me. “In Latin.”

Surely it’s a little odd to be praying for the dead queen on the first day of the king’s honeymoon? “God bless her,” I say awkwardly, knowing that William will report this to his royal master. “Take her pearls and keep them safe. I will pray for her soul myself.”

* * *

Just as the king promised, the word goes out that the new queen has a liking for pretty birds. One of the rooms off my presence chamber is emptied of furniture and filled with perches and cages. At the windows are little aviaries for the singing birds from the Canary Islands. When the sun pours in through the thick glass, they chrip and preen and flutter their little wings. I keep them according to color, the golds and yellows together, the greens next door to them, while the blues flit their little wings against a sky that mirrors their color. I hope that they will breed true. Every morning, after chapel, I visit my bird room and feed them all by hand, loving the feeling of their scratchy light little feet as they perch and peck for seed.

To my delight one day, a dark-skinned lascar sailor with a silver ring in his ear and his face tattooed, more like a painted devil than a man, comes to my presence chamber with a huge bird, as blue as indigo and as big as a buzzard, sitting on his clenched fist. He sells it to me for a ridiculously high price and now I am the very proud owner of a parrot with black knowing eyes. I name him Don Pepe, since he speaks nothing but the most obscene Spanish. I will have to put a cover over his cage when the Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, comes to pay his respects, but Nan assures me that he’s a hard man to shock: after years at the court he has heard far worse.