“Then you will have done the task that God called you to, won’t you?…” I stammered.

She shook her head. “I will tell you, what then. Then illness or accident befalls me and I die childless. And the bastard of Anne Boleyn and the lute player Mark Smeaton steps up to claim the throne: Elizabeth. And the moment she is on the throne she throws off her mask and shows herself for what she is.”

I could hardly recognize the hiss of her voice, the hatred in her face. “Why, what is she? What has she done to upset you so?”

“She has betrayed me,” she said flatly. “When I was fighting for our inheritance, hers as well as mine, she was writing to the man who was marching against me. I know that now. While I was fighting for her as well as for myself she was making an agreement with him for when I was dead. She would have signed it on my execution block.

“When I took her into London at my side they cheered the Protestant princess, and she smiled at the cheers. When I sent her teachers and scholars to explain to her the errors of her faith she smiled at them, her mother’s sly smile, and told them that now she understood, now she would receive the blessing of Mass.

“And then she comes to Mass like a woman forced against her conscience. Hannah! When I was no older than her I had the greatest men of England curse me to my face and threaten me with death if I did not conform to the new religion. They took my mother from me and she died ill and heartbroken and alone, but she never bowed the knee to them. They threatened me with the scaffold for treason! They threatened me with fire for heresy! They were burning men and women for less than I was saying. I had to cling to my faith with all my courage and I did not renounce it until the Emperor of Spain himself told me that I should do so, that I must renounce it, because to keep it was my death sentence. He knew they would kill me if I did not renounce my faith. But all I have done to Elizabeth is to beg her to save her own soul and be my little sister once more!”

“Your Grace…” I whispered. “She’s only young, she will learn.”

“She’s not that young.”

“She will learn…”

“If she is going to learn then she chooses the wrong tutors. She conspires with the kingdom of France against me, she has a band of men who would stop at nothing to see her inherit. Every day someone tells me of another foul plot, and always, the tendrils come back to her. Every time I look at her now, I see a woman steeped in sin, just like her mother, the poisoner. I can almost see her flesh going black from the sin from her heart. I see her turning her back on the Holy Church, I see her turning her back on my love, I see her rushing toward treason and sin.”

“You said she was your little sister,” I reminded her. “You said you loved her as if she was your own child.”

“I did love her,” the queen said bitterly. “More than she remembers. More than I should have done, knowing what her mother did to mine. I did love her. But she is not the child that I loved any more. She is not the little girl that I taught to write and read. She has gone wrong. She has been corrupted. She is steeped in sin. I cannot save her; she is a witch and the daughter of a witch.”

“She’s a young woman,” I protested quietly. “Not a witch.”

“Worse than a witch,” she accused. “A heretic. A hypocrite. A whore. I know her for all these. A heretic because she takes the Mass; but I know her to be a Protestant, and she is forsworn with her eyes on the Host. A hypocrite because she does not even own to her faith. There are brave men and women in this land who would go to the stake for their error; but she is not one of them. When my brother Edward was on the throne she was then a shining light of the reformed religion. She was the Protestant princess in her dark gowns and her white ruffs and her eyes turned down and no gold or jewels in her ears or on her fingers. Now he is dead she kneels beside me to see the raising of the Host, and crosses herself, and curtsies to the altar, but I know it is all false. It is an insult to me, which is nothing; but it is an insult to my mother who was pushed aside for her mother, and it is an insult to the Holy Church, which is a sin against God himself.

“And, God forgive her, she is a whore because of what she did with Thomas Seymour. The whole world would know it; but that other great Protestant whore hid the two of them, and died in hiding it.”

“Who?” I asked. I was appalled and fascinated, all at once, remembering the girl in the sunlit garden and the man who held her against a tree and put his hand up her skirt.

“Katherine Parr,” Queen Mary said through her teeth. “She knew that her husband Thomas Seymour had been seduced by Elizabeth. She caught them at it in Elizabeth’s chamber, Elizabeth in her shift, Lord Thomas all over her. Katherine Parr bundled Elizabeth off to the country, out of the way. She faced down the gossip, she denied everything. She protected the girl – well, she had to, the child was in her house. She protected her husband, and then she died giving birth to his child. Fool. Foolish woman.”

She shook her head. “Poor woman. She loved him so much that she married him before my father was cold in the ground. She scandalized the court, and she risked her place in the world. And he rewarded her by tickling a fourteen-year-old girl in her house, under her supervision. And that girl, my Elizabeth, my little sister, wriggled under his caresses and protested that she would die if he touched her again, but never locked her bedroom door, never complained to her stepmother and never found a better lodging.

“I knew of it. Good God, there was such gossip even I, hidden away in the country, heard of it. I wrote to her and said she should come to me, I had a home, I could provide for us both. She wrote me very sweetly, very fair. She wrote to me that nothing was happening to her and that she did not need to move house. And all the time she was letting him into her chamber in the morning, and letting him lift the hem of her gown to see her shift, and one time, God help her, letting him cut her gown off her, so that she was all but naked before him.

“She never sent to me for help, though she knew I would have taken her away within the day. A little whore then, and a whore now, and I knew it, God forgive me, and hoped that she might be bettered. I thought if I gave her a place at my side, and the honor which would be hers, then she would grow into being a princess. I thought that a young whore in the making could be unmade, could be made anew, could be taught to be a princess. But she cannot. She will not. You will see how she behaves in the future when she has the chance of a tickling once again.”

“Your Grace…” I was overwhelmed by the spilling out of her spite.

She took a breath and turned to the window. She rested her forehead against the thick pane of glass and I saw how the heat from her hair misted the glass. It was cold outside, the unbearable English winter, and the Thames was iron-gray beyond the stone-colored garden beneath the pewter sky. I could see the queen’s reflected face in the thick glass like a cameo drowned in water, I could see the feverish energy pulsing through her body.

“I must be free of this hatred,” she said quietly. “I must be free of the pain that her mother brought me. I must disown her.”

“Your Grace…” I said again, more gently.

She turned back to me.

“She will come after me if I die without heir,” she said flatly. “That lying whore. Anything I achieve will be overturned by her, will be spoiled by her. Everything in my life has always been despoiled by her. I was England’s only princess and the great joy of my mother’s heart. A moment, an eyelid blink, and I was serving in Elizabeth’s nursery as her maid, and my mother was deserted and then dead. Elizabeth, the whore’s daughter, is corruption itself. I have to have a child to put between her and the throne. It is the greatest duty I owe to this country, to my mother and to myself.”