There are letters. She knows their contents without opening them, but she has to pretend surprise.
A few well-wishers, including her busy brother. George is feeling heady due to their good fortune, thinks himself a great man in the making, and quotes too much Cicero.
There was a time they used to bandy Latinate phrases together, thrilled by their own cleverness. It was spiced by a little cruel delight over the fact that neither their sister, not a great learner, nor their mother, a creature of the quiet and pious Plantagenet court of the late Elizabeth of York, could understand them.
God, what children they have been. Beautiful, brilliant children with sharp edges to their words.
Anne promises herself she will reply to George later, but she is not sure what she is going to say. She is unmoored, drifting like an unborn soul in some vestibule of Heaven.
There is a letter from Cardinal Wolsey - this one she remembers well. It had been written in one of the last months when their truce still held, when he was still hoping for her goodwill, before she had unleashed hell upon him.
There was a time she delighted in this reversal of fortune, the mighty prelate hoping for her goodwill, where once he had wrecked her hopes with a word and laughed at her pretensions.
This one is easy to reply to. She pens a gracious letter thanking him for the carps from his own pond.
And then, of course, there is a letter from Henry. This one passed onto her by the physician's own hand, the physician that he had sent to tend to her.
There was a time Anne felt slighted by the fact that her supposedly gallant lover fled at the hint of her sickness. It seemed so disappointing, so incongruous with his ardent promises. Now she sees there are few things on this earth easier to explain. Henry has always adored the human mirrors that showed him something he wanted to see - a chivalrous knight, a godly monarch, a wise Solomon. But a mirror is a mirror; it is not supposed to have the defects of the flesh. A silvered Venetian mirror does not fall ill. A Roman statue does not talk back to you. A stained-glass saint does not declare she is tired or unwilling.
And if she does, one can always pray to another.
Anne puts off replying to this one, and not simply because she is close to nausea at reading these courteous lines breathing with hunger. She needs to decide how to proceed. Had she not prided herself on being the one who inherited her father's cold, slick mind, that small part of the brain that never stopped whirling and scheming and wondering - the feature that George had let lie fallow, and Mary never had in the first place?
When she is judged well enough to come downstairs and join the family at dinner, Anne does her utmost to appear bright and merry. It is harder than she thought it would be. Her body is younger now, and empty of the lingering pain that wretched miscarriages bring, but her mind is the same, and the last few years have worn it thin.
'Have you replied to His Majesty?' Her father asks, his tone mild as always.
'I am composing the best possible answer,' Anne replies.
'In your head?'
'Naturally.'
'If I were you, I would try to draft a few versions on paper. It clears the mind.'
'Paper is not cheap.'
'Neither...' He takes a sip of his wine, and for a second, Anne images that he is going to say neither are you. 'Neither is our project.'
You left me to die.
'Anne, you really must eat something,' her mother interjects. There is a slightly greater number of candles on the table than is prudent, but their amber glow washes Elizabeth Boleyn's skin into a younger mask, and turns her fair hair golden.
You left me to rot.
'Mother, she has only recently awoken from a fever', Mary speaks up. 'I think it's rather natural she has little appetite.'
'When I want to know what you think, I will ask you.'
Mary flinches at this. Years ago, Anne would have been downright gleeful at the spectacle of the once-favourite daughter, the picture of feminine charm, reduced to a fallen star, with Anne's own sun finally rising in its stead.
Now, her lips are unmoving.
'Anne, you have to make an effort,' her mother persists. 'What if His Majesty would desire to see you next week, and you came to him looking like a skeleton? Some defects no clever garments can conceal.'
'Especially since, if he desires to... see me, and I acquiesce, the garments aren't likely to stay on for the whole duration?' Anne asks, her words arch.
'Illness does not give you an excuse to be vulgar.'
'I would have thought truthfulness is a virtue. Did not John the Baptist say that the truth will set us free?'
Having said this, she puts a small piece of swan's breast between her lips, and takes her time to chew it into nothingness, even though she can barely discern any taste.
***
Her mother is beautiful as always, even when she is preparing for sleep. Perhaps especially so, for her hair is released from their pins, and is now cascading down to the middle of her back in locks of russet gold.
There was a time - many years ago, in the misty ignorance of her childhood - when Anne thought that her own unremarkable appearance was simply a matter of age; that, when she grew up, time was going to mend the sharpness of her features, the flatness of her breasts, and, perhaps, was even going to gild her dark hair. After all, it certainly could not be that a fair swan like Elizabeth Boleyn could hatch a little she-crow like her younger daughter.
The miracle did not happen. The she-crow remained a she-crow. To be fair, that was unconnected with Anne losing her belief in miracles.
'I hope I did not disturb you in your prayers,' her mother says, closing the door behind her.
'A little'.
'I hope your prayers were for our family's commonwealth.'
'They always are, mother.'
'I would have never supposed so, judging by your actions.'
The words didn't even hurt - they were expected. Not these precise ones, of course, but something with their general meaning.
So many years, striving for her approval. Look, mother, I might not be a beauty like my sister, but I embroider more finely than her. Look, mother, I speak French as though I had been born across the Narrow Sea now, I can even write you a letter in it.
Look, mother, the jewels of the Crown are glittering upon my throat. I made the greatest nobles of the kingdom bow to me - and to you, too. I have returned the glory of your youth to you, for I know you have always pined for the adulation you were once shown at the court of the first of the Tudors.
So many years, wasted.
'I wonder what have I done to displease you,' Anne says, looking into her mother's fine dark eyes. This woman allowed me to die. She thought the sickening mixture of resentment and yearning for praise that was not unlike a lover's would never leave her blood, but death has banished it for good.
'I think you know. You are cleverer than that. Or, at least, I thought you to be - now I am starting to think you have turned into one of these ladies who have too much book-knowledge and too little womanly wisdom.'
'Let us suppose I have. Explain my transgression to me, mother.'
'Do you think His Majesty will wait forever?'
Anne can recall a time when such a question would have prompted from her a proud turn of the head and a cutting remark on how His Majesty would wait as long as she would like. She, who had always prided herself on a stark, if bleak, outlook on life, had allowed herself to be intoxicated by the flourishes of courtly love.
It took too long for her to realize that, for all that a courtly admirer often used the same address for his lady-love as one would for his sovereign lord, that did not mean that the former was as powerful as the latter. Nor as protected, either. Not even close.
'No, mother.'
'Then why, by all that is holy, are you still behaving as though you were sworn to virginity in a nunnery?'
'I find his company displeasing.'
A silence of astonishment, as though her mother could not quite believe such idiocy could flourish under her roof.
'We have clearly coddled you too much', she finally said. 'You seem to think yourself some singular creature, exempt from family obligations and the laws of nature both.'
'What laws of nature?'
'The laws of time, first and foremost,' she snapped. 'For Heaven's sake, you are going to be thirty in a few years!'
'The laws of time will not change if I become King Henry's bedmate. I will still reach that age with the very same speed. Except, in that case, no man would marry me afterwards.'
'No man would marry you now. They are too afraid to incur His Majesty's displeasure. After he had been satisfied with your company... who knows? Mistress Blount has done rather well for herself in that regard. And for her family'.
'I have never rebelled against making a good marriage. I knew my duty. But the duty you propose - '
'- has already been performed by your sister, earlier, and with less argument. Why do you think yourself above it? You are certainly old enough to lie with a man. No woman has ever died of the displeasure, that I can tell you. You recoil as though I am proposing you don a blue ruff and join the girls in the stews of Southwark.'
No, mother, Anne thinks. You are merely proposing I lie with a man I now feel nothing but revulsion for in exchange for worldly goods. That is certainly utterly unlike the daily occupation of the girls in the stews of Southwark.
Suddenly, however, she feels strangely numb, as though her body had been drifting in freezing water for a long, long time, and she had stopped feeling the cold and the pain alike.
Let it be. Let the dice fall when it may.
Let Henry have her, and grow tired of her as he grew tired of her sister, and give her parents a few court appointments and the small title they so desired. Perhaps, then she would be allowed to quietly withdraw from the world, dissolve in a country marriage like Mistress Blount had, and never again set foot among the wolves of court.
'Very well,' she says aloud. 'I will... I will think of it.'
'The time of thought is long past,' her mother persists, her eyes glittering with purpose. Of course she does. There is a reason the ambitious courtier Thomas Boleyn saw his soulmate in her all those years ago.
Anne winces, as though from a headache that simply does not, will not go away.
'I'll do it,' she murmurs. 'I will.'
Immediately, her mother's expression melts into one of perfect amiability.
'Oh, Anne,' she sighs. 'I knew you were going to see reason someday - but, forgive me, you can be stubborn as a mule. Of course, you have to be fitted well to appear at court again -'
The next few minutes, her mother speaks with an almost girlish excitement of the gowns and other articles of fashion she will have made on her daughter's behalf, an imaginary waterfall of silver-embroidered kirtles, green Bruges satin, yellow and russet velvet, and white damask to shine against her dark hair.
Anne does not listen, and nods as though she were some mechanical marvel of a doll, and wonders at one point if, perhaps, though all those years, her family - mother, father, Uncle Norfolk - would have dearly preferred her to be just that.