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and their contempt for me as a girl. At least Harry was past all that.
    I gestured at her book. ‘What’s in it?’
    My question threw her. ‘It’s – I’m translating—’ but she halted; it was probably obvious I’d already lost interest, or, more accurately, had had no real interest in the first place.
    And, anyway, it had been none of my business to ask.
    Translating for whom, I puzzled: who was here to translate for?
    Returning to her page, she added, ‘There’s Mass, apparently, at ten.’ If you want it.
    I said nothing. You think you know me, but you don’t. I had no intention of going to Mass while I was here. There was no one watching me, so why should I go? Whatever else this incarceration was, it could be freedom from chapel; it might as well be that. Lolling on the window seat, listening to housemartin-chunter beneath the eaves, I drew up and clasped my knees. I’d stay here: this space at the window would be mine. She could have that table and those books, and the breakfast if she wanted it, and I could have this viewof the outside world or, for as long as we were here, what would have to count as the outside world. It might not be much, but it was something.
    The soon-to-be-crowned Queen would be stopping en route at least once a day for Mass; every respectable household between here and Ipswich would be frantically preparing to welcome her. Ipswich was practically home for me; she’d been in my home town while I was here in what was about to become hers. She was heading for the Tower to prepare for her coronation. How different her journey from Ipswich to London would be from mine: no dressing down, no keeping her head down (although in her time she’d had to do more than enough of that). And no rush, because she had her subjects to receive in their thousands, all along the way. They were flocking to her, the Fitzalans had said: the earl had sent news home of people in their thousands tripping over themselves to kneel at the side of the road. Thousands upon thousands of them, relieved and overjoyed, as if it had taken Mary Tudor to come riding along as Queen to liberate them. We, her subjects, hadn’t come to her support but instead she’d come to ours: we’d needed her, and there she was. Just as well that no one, anywhere, during the troubled days, had fired a shot, because now absolutely everyone could claim to have been for her all along, but just cowed, hoodwinked, led astray.
    I had asked Harry about it, a couple of days before my mother and I made our dash to London. I’d asked him what was going to happen. If anyone knew, he would. ‘We’ll askHarry,’ my father so often said. Harry knew whatever there was to know, not because he was all that frequently at court – he was happier at home – but because, being down-to-earth and commonsensical, he was trusted.
    On this, he’d been reluctant to speculate, but I’d pressed and eventually got an answer, which was nothing: nothing, he said, would happen. It’s done, he’d said, done and dusted: the Grey girl is Queen. He’d sounded pleased enough about it; he was reformist, but, anyway, he liked things decided. I’d persisted, though, because I just couldn’t quite believe it: would no one try anything? Try anything : I hadn’t wanted to say fight ; I didn’t want to think of any fighting, even on behalf of poor, benighted Lady Mary.
    Harry didn’t think so; but if they did, he said, they’d be stupid, because they hadn’t a hope in Hell. And anyway, he said, why would anyone want the Lady Mary on the throne? She’d take the country back to Rome, he’d said, and we’re done with Rome. All of us, of any and every persuasion: we’re free of Rome, he said; Catholics are English Catholics now, not Roman Catholics. No one in England had any need of a pope.
    But it just wasn’t right, I said: the