She looks me up and down as if I am applying for a post in her household and then slowly she smiles. “You are lucky in your looks,” she says. “Your mother was always a beauty and you are very like her: fair, slender, skin like a rose petal and that wonderful hair, gold and bronze all at once. Undoubtedly you will have beautiful children. I suppose you are still proud of your looks? I suppose you are still vain?”

I say nothing, and she clears her throat and remembers the reason for her visit.

“I have come to speak with you in private, as a friend,” she says. “We parted on bad terms.”

We parted like a pair of fishwives. But I was sure then that my lover would kill her son and make me Queen of England. Now, as it turns out, her son has killed my lover and my fate is entirely in her white, heavily ringed hands.

“I regret it,” I say with simple insincerity.

“I too,” she says, which surprises me. “I am to be your mother-in-law, Elizabeth. My son will marry you, despite everything.”

There is no point in my sudden pulse of anger at the “despite everything.” We are defeated, my hopes of happiness and being a beloved Queen of England went down under the hooves of the Stanley horsemen commanded by her husband.

I bow my head. “Thank you.”

“I will be a good mother to you,” she says earnestly. “You will find, when you come to know me, that I have great love to give, that I have a talent for loyalty. I am determined to do the will of God and I am certain that God has chosen you to be my daughter-in-law, the wife of my son, and”—her voice drops to an awed whisper at the thought of my destiny, at the divine promise of the Tudor line—“the mother of my grandson.”

I bow my head again, and when I look up, I see that her face is shining; she is quite inspired.

“When I was a little girl, no more than a child myself, I was called on to give birth to Henry,” she whispers, as if in prayer. “I thought I would die from the pain, I was certain it would kill me. I knew then that, if I survived, the child and I would have a great future, the greatest future that could be. He would be King of England and I would put him on the throne.”

There is something very moving about her rapt expression, like a nun describing her vocation.

“I knew,” she says. “I knew that he was to be king. And when I met you, I knew that you were destined to bear his son.” She turns her intense gaze on me. “That is why I was hard on you, that is why I was so furious with you when I saw you straying from your path. That is why I couldn’t stand it when I saw you falling from your position, from your destiny, from your calling.”