They don’t know how moderate she is in her religion, how interested in open and thoughtful discussion. They don’t know that she is a scholar and that we are talking about a new translation of the Gospels. They don’t know that Lady Elizabeth has now read every single one of Bishop Fisher’s psalms and even translated lines under my supervision. They don’t think of either young woman as anything but an empty figurehead for their supporters. They don’t realize that we are all women with minds of our own. Bishop Gardiner thinks that if Lady Mary ever comes to the throne she will take the country back to Rome at his bidding. Thomas Howard thinks that a Howard girl will deliver the ruling of the country to his family. None of them believes I am a serious power at court. They don’t consider me to be a thinking woman. Yet I may be regent, and then it will be I who will rule whether the country will hear Mass in English or Latin, and I shall determine what the priests say in their sermons.

“My lord? What is your wish?”

“What d’you think would be right?” he asks me.

“I think that there is no need for a king as strong and as young as you to trouble himself at all,” I flatter him.

He gestures to his leg. “I am half a man,” he says bitterly.

“You will get better. You will be riding again. You have the health and strength of a man half your age. You always recover. You have this terrible wound and you live with it, you defeat it. I see you conquer it like an enemy, day after day.”

He is pleased. “They don’t think that.” He nods irritably towards the door. “They are thinking of my death.”

“They think only of themselves,” I say, condemning them generally in order to maintain my own position. “What do they want?”

“They want their own kin to have preference,” he says shortly. “Or their candidate. And they all hope to rule the kingdom by ruling Edward.”

Slowly I nod, as if the naked ambition of the courtiers is a sad revelation to me. “And what do you think, my lord? Nothing matters more than what you think is right.”

He shifts his seat and winces with the pain. He leans a little closer. “I have been watching you,” he says.

His words ring in my head like a warning bell. He has been watching me. What has he seen? The rolled manuscript of psalms going to the copyist? The mornings of study with the two princesses? My recurring nightmare of closed doors at the top of a damp stair? My erotic daydreams of Thomas? Can I have spoken in my sleep? Can I have said his name? Have I been such a fool as to lie beside the king and breathe the name of another man?