In fact the two men were celebrating Easter at Windsor in each other’s company and had taken Jane with them, leaving the queen and her daughters to be transported by boat to Greenwich for the holiest of feast days. “Elizabeth has always preferred her Placentia Palace, but I am happiest at Windsor,” Edward had told Jane when they climbed aboard the royal barge, its pennants and standard lifting limply in an almost windless day. “The air is more bracing, and the hunting better.” It took them two days to be conveyed between the banks bursting with early flowers: yellow primroses, pink butterbur, tiny white daisies in among the dandelions, and the purple faces of violets. Edward’s jester was silent for once but for his soft strumming on a mandora that seemed to echo the plangent rippling of the water from the oars. Jane thought she had never been happier as she nestled in the crook of Edward’s broad arm and listened to him discuss politics with Will opposite them. Windsor welcomed its lord home with a hunt and a Good Friday feast featuring many dishes to tempt Edward, who hated fish.
