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daughter. Elizabeth’s alert eyes were indeed focused upon the Admiral, while Jane, dressed expensively but very plainly for a girl of her high station, crinkled her brow in disapproval at the queen’s bright summer gown.
    I turned my own attention upon Lady Jane. In the last century, it had been Jane’s great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Woodville, whose beauty had led Edward IV to make her, a knight’s widow and a mere commoner, his queen. This girl was descended from Elizabeth Woodville’s first marriage, to one John Grey, as well as from her royal marriage, and the family’s good looks had not been much diluted over the generations. Jane was a pretty child, with reddish-brown hair, much darker than that of her kinswoman the lady Elizabeth, and she was slender and pale skinned, like her mother, Frances, and her grandmother, the French queen. If she’d been my daughter, though—and I had two living—I would have put her in a gown of a more flattering color. If I’d not learned to play at the game of courtly love during my time at court, I had at least learned to dress well. But the Marquis of Dorset was a strong evangelical, more so than his wife, and evidently it was he who had influenced the manner of his daughter’s dress. “Are you enjoying staying with the Admiral, Lady Jane?” I asked when we were seated side by side at table. “He is a charming man.”
    Lady Jane looked toward her guardian, who was chatting animatedly with the queen and with the lady Elizabeth. “He is,” she allowed in a low tone of voice. It was clear she had never thought of such a thing.
    “They tell me you are quite a scholar,” I ventured.
    “My tutors say I get on well,” Lady Jane acknowledged.
    “You will like the queen, then. I suppose you have heard that she has written and published her own book of prayers? And the lady Elizabeth translated it just last year for the king, into French, Italian, and Latin.”
    Jane’s little nose wrinkled in unmistakable jealousy. “I know French and Latin, and I am to learn Italian.”
    “Of course you will,” I said reassuringly.
    My companion’s well-bred silence told me I had presumed.
    ***
    After my disconcerting trip to Chelsea, it was a relief to return to our new home in Holborn: Ely Place, which John had acquired after years of leasing lodgings in the city. It was the grandest house in which we’d lived, and we had been staying there for so short a time that I still could get lost in its tangle of staircases and corridors. I managed, however, to make my way to John’s chamber without incident and to tell him the news.
    “The queen has married?”
    “Yes, and I confess it made me uncomfortable.”
    “It should have,” said John. He shook his head. “Why couldn’t she have waited a year? I daresay the king wasn’t a model husband, but she owed him that much respect.”
    “So you won’t speak to the Protector?”
    “No. What can I say? If they hadn’t married already, I would have been willing enough to say a word; it’s none of my concern if the queen wants to marry a rascal. But now that they have married, I can hardly speak to Somerset as if they hadn’t done the deed already. All I can promise her is to keep silent. That is as much deceit as I care to practice. He is, after all, my friend.” John snorted. “And it won’t be a secret for long, with the Admiral going back and forth to the queen’s place night after night. Especially with the lady Elizabeth in her household, and Dorset’s daughter in his. The lady Elizabeth is too sharp to miss such antics, though I know little enough about the lady Jane.”
    I smiled. “The lady Jane would not approve of such romantic folly, but I doubt she pays much attention to anything that is not within the covers of a book. She’s very bright, but a rather frosty little creature.”
    “I wonder whom Dorset is considering as a husband for her?”
    “Someone with a good-sized library.” I snickered. “And with a