We have our candidate for the queen’s favor and I have done next to nothing to hasten the courtship. Without any prompting but a girl’s desire, she has fallen head over heels in love with Thomas Culpepper, and by all I can see, he with her. The king’s leg is giving him less pain, and he has come out from his private rooms since Easter and the court is back to normal again; but there are still many chances for the young couple to meet, and, indeed, the king throws them together, telling Culpepper to dance with the queen, or advising her on her gambling when Culpepper is dealing. The king loves Culpepper as his favorite groom of the bedchamber, and he takes him everywhere he goes, delighting in his charm and his wit and his good looks. Whenever he visits the queen, Culpepper is always in his train, and the king likes to see the two young people together. If he were not blinded by his monstrous vanity, he would see that he is throwing them into each other’s arms; but, instead, he sees the three of them as a merry trio and swears that Culpepper reminds him of his boyhood.

The girl queen and the boy courtier are playing pairs together, with the king overlooking both of their cards like an indulgent father with two handsome children, when the Duke of Norfolk makes his way around the room to talk to me.

“He is back in her rooms? She is bedding the king as she should?”

“Yes,” I say, hardly moving my lips, my face turned toward the handsome young pair and their doting elder. “But to what effect, no one can know.”

He nods. “And Culpepper is willing to service her?”

I smile and glance up at him. “As you see, she is hot for him, and he longs for her.”

He nods. “I thought as much. And he is a great favorite with the king; that’s to our advantage. The king likes to see her dance with his favorites. And he is a conscienceless bastard; that’s to our advantage, too. D’you think he is reckless enough to risk it?”

I take a moment to admire the way the duke can plot with his eyes on his victim, and anyone would think he was talking of nothing but the weather.

“I think he is in love with her; I think he would risk his life for her right now.”

“Sweet,” he says sourly. “We’ll have to watch him. He has a temper. There was some incident, wasn’t there? He raped some game-keeper’s wife?”

I shake my head and turn away. “I hadn’t heard.”

He offers me his arm and together we stroll down the gallery. “Raped her and killed her husband when he tried to defend her. The king issued him a pardon for both offenses.”

I am too old to be shocked. “A favorite indeed,” I say dryly. “What else might the king forgive him?”

“But why would Katherine fancy him, above all the others? There’s no merit in him at all except youth and good looks and arrogance.”

I laugh. “For a girl married to an ugly man old enough to be her grandfather, that is probably enough.”

“Well, she can have him, if she wishes, and I may find another youth to throw in her way as well. I have my eye on a former favorite of hers, just returned from Ireland and still carrying a torch. Can you encourage her while we are on progress, perhaps? She will be less watched, and if she were to conceive this summer she could be crowned before Christmas. I would feel safer if she had the crown on her head and a baby in her belly, especially if the king falls sick again. His doctor says his bowels are bound up tight.”

“I can help the two of them,” I say. “I can make it easy for them to meet. But I can hardly do more than that.”

The duke smiles. “Culpepper is such a blackguard, and she is such a flirt, that I doubt you need do more than that, my dear Lady Rochford.”

He is so warm and so confiding that I dare to put my hand on his arm as he moves to go back to the inner circle. “And my own affairs,” I remind him.

His smile does not waver for a moment. “Ah, your hopes for marriage,” he says. “I am pursuing something. I will tell you later.”

“Who is it?” I ask. Foolish, but I find I have caught my breath, like a girl. If I were to be married soon, it is not impossible but that I could have another child. If I were to be married to some great man, I could lay down the foundation of a great family, build a big house, amass a fortune to hand down to my own heirs. I could do better than the Boleyns did. I could see my family rise. I could leave a fortune, and the shame and distress of my first marriage would be forgotten in the glamour of my second.

“You will have to be patient,” he says. “Let’s get this business with Katherine settled first.”

It is springtime. I have never noticed a season so much in my life before; but this year the sun is so bright and the birdsong so loud that I wake at dawn and I lie awake with every inch of my skin like silk, and my lips moist, and my heart thudding with desire. I want to laugh without cause; I want to give my ladies little gifts to make them happy. I want to dance, I want to run down the long allées of the garden and twirl around at the bottom and fall on the grass and smell the pale scent of the primroses. I want to ride all day and dance all night and gamble the king’s fortune away. I have an enormous appetite; I taste all the dishes that come to the royal table and then I send the best, the very best, to one table or another – but never, never to his.

I have a secret; it is a secret so great that some days I think I can hardly breathe for the way it burns on my tongue, hot for telling. Some days it is like a tickle that makes me want to laugh. Every day, every night and day, it is like the warm, insistent pulse of lust.

One person knows it, only one. He looks at me during Mass when I peer over the balcony of the queen’s box and see him down below. Slowly, slowly his head turns as if he can feel my gaze on him; he looks up, he gives me that smile, the one that starts at his blue eyes and then moves to his kissable mouth, and then he gives me the cheekiest, quickest flash of a wink. Because he knows the secret.

When we are riding, his horse comes alongside mine in the hunt and his bare hand brushes my glove, and it is as if I am scalded by his touch. I dare not even look at him then, he does no more than this, the gentlest touch, just to tell me that he knows the secret; he knows the secret, too.

And when we are dancing and the steps bring us together and we are handclasped and we should, according to the rules of the dance, lock gazes as we go round, then we drop our eyes, or look away, or seem quite indifferent. Because we dare not be too close; I dare not have my face near his; I dare not look at his eyes, his warm mouth, the temptation of his smile.

When he kisses my hand to leave my rooms, he does not touch my fingers with his lips; he breathes on them. It is the most extraordinary sensation, the most overwhelming feeling. All I can feel is the warmth of his breath. In his gentle grasp he must feel my fingers stir like a sweet meadow beneath a breeze, under that slightest touch.

And what is this secret that wakes me at dawn and keeps me quivering like a hare until darkness when my fingers tremble at the warmth of his breath? It is such a secret that I never even name it to myself. It is a secret. It is a secret. I hug it to myself in the darkness of the night when King Henry is at last asleep and I can find a little patch of the bed that is not heated by his bulk nor stinking of his wound, then I form the words in my head but I do not even whisper them to myself: I have a secret.

I pull my pillow down toward me, and I stroke back a lock of hair from my face. I smooth my cheek against the pillow and am ready for sleep. I close my eyes: I have a secret.