“Husband,” I say sweetly.

“Come to bed, my rose,” he says. “Henry wants his rose.”

I grit my teeth on the stupidity of his calling himself Henry. “I want to tell you something,” I say. “I have some happy news.”

He heaves himself up, so that his head with the nightcap askew bobs up a little.

“Yes?”

“I have missed my course,” I say. “I may be with child.”

“Oh, rose! My sweetest rose!”

“It is early days,” I warn him. “But I thought you would want to know at once.”

“Before anything else!” he assures me. “Dearest, as soon as you tell me it is true, I shall have you crowned queen.”

“But Edward will still be your heir?” I query.

“Yes, yes, but it would be such a weight off my mind if I knew that Edward had a brother. A family cannot be safe with only one son: a dynasty needs boys. One small accident and everything is finished; but if you have two boys, you are safe.”

“And I will have a grand coronation,” I specify, thinking of the crown and the jewels and the gown and the feasting and the thousands of people who will come out to cheer me, the new Queen of England.

“You will have the greatest coronation that England has ever seen, for you are the greatest queen,” he promises me. “And as soon as we get back to London I shall declare a day of national celebration for you.”

“Oh?” This sounds rather wonderful, a day to celebrate my existence! Kitty Howard: voilà indeed! “A whole day for me?”

“A day when everyone will go to church and say prayers of thanksgiving that God has given you to me.”

Just church, after all. I give a faint, disappointed smile.

“And the Master of the Revels will prepare a great feast and celebration at court,” he says. “And everyone will give you presents.”

I beam. “That sounds lovely,” I say with satisfaction.

“You are my sweetest rose,” he says. “My rose without a thorn. Come to bed with me now, Katherine.”

“Yes.” I make sure I do not think of my Thomas as I go to the bloated figure in the big bed. I have a wide, happy smile on my face, and I close my eyes so I need not look at him. I cannot avoid the smell of him or the feel of him, but I can make sure that I do not think of him at all while I do what I have to do, and then lie beside him and wait for the little snuffles of satisfaction to turn to wheezy snores as he goes to sleep.

Her course started something like a week late, but I was not too disheartened. The mere thought of it had been enough to make the king more in love with her than ever, and she had at least agreed that though the sun rises and shines only on Thomas Culpepper, he does not have to be privy to every little secret.

She has behaved very prettily with the people whom she has met on this progress; even when she has been bored and inattentive, she has kept a pleasant smile on her face, and she has learned to follow a little behind the king and to maintain an appearance of demure obedience. She serves him in bed like a paid whore, and she sits next to him at dinner and never shows by a flicker of expression that he has broken wind. She is a selfish, stupid girl, but she might, given time, make quite a good queen. If she conceives a child and gives England a son, she might live long enough to learn to be a queen that is admired.

The king, at any rate, is mad about her. His indulgence makes our task of getting Culpepper in and out of her bedchamber so much easier. We had a bad night in Pontefract when he sent Sir Anthony Denny to her room without announcement, and she was locked in with Culpepper. Denny tried the door and went away without saying anything. There was another night when the king stirred in her bed while they were at their business only on the other side of the door, and she had to go flying back in to the old man, still damp with sweat and kisses. If the air had not been heavy with the stink of his wind, he would have smelled the scent of lust for certain. At Grafton Regis the lovers coupled in the jakes – Culpepper crept up the stairs to the stone-walled chamber that overhangs the moat, and she told her ladies that she was sick as a dog and spent the afternoon with him in there, frantically humping while the rest of us made possets. If it were not so dangerous, it would be funny. As it is, it still makes me breathless with a mixture of fear and lust when I hear them together.

I never laugh. I think of my husband and his sister and any laughter dies in my mouth. I think of his promising to be her man through any trouble. I think of her, desperate to conceive a son, sure that Henry could not give her one. I think of the unholy pact they must have made. Then, with a little moan, I think that all this is my fear, my fantasy, and perhaps it never happened. The worst thing about the two of them being dead is that now I will never know what happened. The only way I have borne the thought of what they did, and the part I played, in all these years has been to put the thought far from me. I never think of it, I never speak of it, and no one ever speaks of them in my hearing. It is as if they never were. That is the only way I can bear the fact that I am alive and they are gone: to pretend that they never were.

“So when Queen Anne Boleyn was accused of treason, did they really mean adultery?” Katherine asks me.

The question, so sharp on the point of my own thinking, is like a stab. “What d’you mean?” I ask.

We are riding from Collyweston to Ampthill on a bright, cold morning in October. The king is ahead, galloping with the young men of his court, thinking he is winning a race as they hold their horses back, Thomas Culpepper among them. Katherine is ambling along on her gray mare, and I am at her side on one of the Howard hunters. Everyone else has dropped back to gossip, and there is no one to shield me from her curiosity.

“You said earlier that she and the other men were accused of adultery,” she pursues.

“That was months ago.”

“I know, I have been thinking about it.”

“You think very slowly,” I say nastily.

“I know I do,” she says, quite unabashed. “And I have been thinking that they accused Anne Boleyn, my cousin, of treason only because she was unfaithful to the king, and they beheaded her.” She glances around her. “And I have been thinking that I am in the same situation,” she says. “That if anyone knew – they would say that I am unfaithful to the king. Perhaps they would call it treason, too. Then what would happen to me?”

“That is why we never say anything,” I reply. “That is why we take care. Remember? I have warned you from the beginning to take care.”

“But why did you help me meet Thomas? Knowing as you do what a danger it is? After your own sister-in-law was killed for just the same thing?”

I am lost for an answer. I never thought that she would ask me this question. But her stupidity is such that she does, sometimes, go straight to the most obvious. I turn my head as if I am looking over the cold meadows where the river, swollen with the recent rains, shines like a sword, a French sword.

“Because you asked me to help you,” I say. “I am your friend.”

“Did you help Anne Boleyn?”

“No!” I exclaim. “She would have no help of mine!”

“You were not her friend?”

“I was her sister-in-law.”

“Did she not like you?”

“I doubt she ever saw me from start to finish. She had no eyes for me.”

This does not halt her speculation, as I intended, but feeds it. I can almost hear the slow revolving of her thoughts.

“She didn’t like you?” Katherine asks. “She and her husband and her sister, they were always together. But they left you out.”

I laugh, but it doesn’t come out well. “You make it sound like children in the school yard.”