It wasn’t always like that. I can just about remember first coming to my step-grandmama’s house at Horsham and every second sentence was “my niece the queen” and every letter to London asked her for a favor or a fee, a place for a servant, or the pickings of a monastery, asked her to turn out a priest or pull down a nunnery. Then Anne had a girl and there was a good deal of “our baby the Princess Elizabeth” and hopes that the next baby would be a boy. Everyone promised me I would have a place at court in my cousin’s household, I would be kin to the Queen of England, who knew where I might look for a husband? Another Howard cousin, Mary, was married to the king’s bastard son Henry Fitzroy, and a cousin was intended for Princess Mary. We were so intermarried with the Tudors that we would be royal ourselves. But then slowly, like winter coming when you don’t at first notice the chill, there was less spoken of her, and less certainty about her court. Then one day my step-grandmother called the whole household into the great hall and said abruptly that Anne Boleyn (she called her that, no title, definitely no kinship), Anne Boleyn had disgraced herself and her family and betrayed her king and that her name and her brother’s name would never again be mentioned.

Of course we were all desperate to know what had happened, but we had to wait for servants’ gossip. Only when the news finally came from London could I learn what my cousin Queen Anne had done. My maid told me, I can hear her now telling me, that Lady Anne was accused of terrible crimes, adultery with many men, her brother among them, witchcraft, treason, bewitching the king, a string of horrors from which only one thing stood out to me, an aghast little girl: that her accuser was her uncle, my uncle Norfolk. That he presided over the court, that he pronounced her death sentence and that his son, my handsome cousin, went to the Tower like a man might go to a fair, dressed in his best, to see his cousin beheaded.

I thought my uncle must be a man so fearsome that he might have been in league with the devil; but I can laugh at those childish fears, now that I am his favorite, so high in his favor that he has ordered Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, to take most particular care of me, and given her money to buy me a gown. Obviously, he has taken a great fancy to me; he likes me best of all the Howard girls he has placed at court, and thinks that I will advance the interests of the family by making a noble match or becoming friends with the queen, or charming to the king. I had thought him a man of fiendish heartlessness, but now I find him a kindly uncle to me.

There is a masque after dinner and some very funny clowning from the king’s fool, and then there is some singing that is almost unbearably dull. The king is a great musician, I learn, and so most evenings we will have to endure one of his songs. There is a great deal of tra-la-la-ing, and everyone listens very intently and applauds very loudly at the end. Lady Anne I think has no more opinion of it than me, but she makes the mistake of gazing round rather vacantly, as if she were quietly wishing to be elsewhere. I see the king glance at her, and then away, as if he is irritated by her inattention. I take the precaution of clasping my hands beneath my chin and smiling with my eyes half-closed as if I can hardly bear the joy of it. Such luck! He happens to glance my way again and clearly thinks his music has transported me. He gives me a broad, approving smile, and I smile back and drop my eyes to the board as if fearful of looking at him for too long.

“Very well done,” says Lady Rochford, and I give her a little beam of triumph. I love, I love, I love court life. I swear it will quite turn my head.

“My lord duke,” I say, bowing very low.

We are in the Howard apartments at Greenwich Palace, a series of beautiful rooms opening the one into another, almost as spacious and beautiful as the queen’s own rooms. I stayed here once with George, when we were newly wed, and I remember the view over the river, and the light at dawn when I woke, so much in love, and I heard the sound of swans flying overhead going down to the river on their huge creaking wings.

“Ah, Lady Rochford,” says my lord duke, his lined face amiable. “I have need of you.”

I wait.

“You are friendly with the Lady Anne; you are on good terms?”

“As far as I can be,” I say cautiously. “She speaks little English as yet, but I have made a great effort to talk to her, and I think she likes me.”

“Would she confide in you?”

“She would speak to her Cleves companions first, I think. But she sometimes asks me things about England. She trusts me, I think.”

He turns to the window and taps his thumbnail against his yellow teeth. His sallow face is creased in thought.

“There is a difficulty,” he says slowly.

I wait.

“As you heard, they have indeed sent her without the proper documents,” he says. “She was betrothed when she was a child to Francis of Lorraine, and the king needs to see that this engagement was canceled and put aside before he goes any further.”

“She is not free to marry?” I demand, astounded. “When the contracts have been signed and she has come all this way and been greeted by the king as his bride? When the City of London has welcomed her as their new queen?”

“It is possible,” he says evasively.

It is absolutely impossible, but it is not my place to say so. “Who says that she may not be free to marry?”

“The king fears to proceed. His conscience is uneasy.”

I pause, I cannot think fast enough to make sense of this. This is a king who married his own brother’s wife, and then put her aside because he said the lifelong marriage was invalid. This is a king who put Anne Boleyn’s head on the block as a matter of his own judgment under the exclusive guidance of God. Clearly, this is not a king who would be deterred from marrying a woman just because some German ambassador did not have the right piece of paper to hand. Then I remember the moment when she pushed him aside, and his face as he stepped back from her at Rochester.

“It is true then. He doesn’t like her. He can’t forgive her for her treatment of him at Rochester. He will find a way to get out of the marriage. He is going to claim precontract again.” One glance at the duke’s dark face tells me that I have guessed right, and I could almost laugh aloud at this new twist in the play that is King Henry’s comedy. “He doesn’t like her, and he is going to send her home.”

“If she confessed that she was precontracted, she could go home again, without dishonor, and the king would be free,” the duke says quietly.

“But she likes him,” I say. “At any rate, she likes him enough. And she can’t go home again. No woman of any sense would go home again. Go back to be spoiled goods in Cleves when you could be Queen of England? She would never want that. Who would marry her if he refuses her? Who could marry her if he declares her precontracted? Her life would be over.”

“She could clear herself of the precontract,” he says reasonably.

“Is there one?”

He shrugs. “Almost certainly not.”

I think for a moment. “Then how can she be released from something that does not exist?”

He smiles. “That is a matter for the Germans. She can be sent home against her will, if she does not cooperate.”

“Not even the king can abduct her and fling her out of the kingdom.”

“If she could be entrapped into saying that there was a precontract.” His voice is like a whisper of silk. “If it came from her own mouth that she is not free to marry…”

I nod. I begin to see the favor he would have of me.

“The king would be most grateful to the man who could tell him that he had a confession from her. And the woman who brought such a confession about would be most high in his favor. And in mine.”