He gave no explanation. He did not tarry. He did not speak to the queen. But covered the miles back, Norris beside him: Norris puzzled, Norris astonished, Norris almost slipping from the saddle with fright. ‘I taxed him with the matter,’ Henry says. ‘With the boy Mark’s confession. He would say nothing, but of his innocence.’ Again that flat, scornful little laugh. ‘But since then, Master Treasurer has questioned him. Norris admits it, he says he loved her. But when Fitz put it to him that he is an adulterer, that he desired my death so he could marry her, he said no, no and no. You will put questions to him, Cromwell, but when you do, tell him again what I told him as we rode. There can be mercy. There may be mercy, if he confesses and names the others.’

‘We have names from Mark Smeaton.’

‘I would not trust him,’ Henry says contemptuously. ‘I would not trust some little fiddle-player with the lives of men I have called my friends. I await some corroboration of his story. We will see what the lady says when she is taken.’

‘Their confessions will be enough, sir, surely. You know who is suspected. Let me take them all in ward.’

But Henry’s mind has strayed. ‘Cromwell, what does it mean, when a woman turns herself about and about in the bed? Offering herself, this way and that? What would put it into her head to do such a thing?’

There is only one answer. Experience, sir. Of men’s desires and her own. He does not need to say it.

‘One way is apt for the procreation of children,’ Henry says. ‘The man lies on her. Holy church sanctions it, on the permitted days. Some churchmen say that though it is a grievous thing for a brother to copulate with a sister, it is still more grievous should a woman sit astride a man, or should a man approach a woman as if she were a bitch. For these practices, and others I will not name, Sodom was destroyed. I fear that any Christian man or woman who is in thrall to such vices will incur a judgement: what do you say? Where would a woman, not bred in a whorehouse, get knowledge of such things?’

‘Women talk among themselves,’ he says. ‘As men do.’

‘But a sober, a godly matron, whose only duty is to get a child?’

‘I suppose she might want to pique her good man’s interest, sir. So he does not venture to Paris Garden or some other ill-reputed place. If, let’s say, they were long married.’

‘But three years? Is that long?’

‘No, sir.’

‘It is not even three.’ For a moment the king has forgotten that we are not talking about himself, but about some notional, God-fearing Englishman, some forester or ploughman. ‘Where would she get the idea?’ he persists. ‘How would she know the man would like it?’

He bites back the obvious answer: perhaps she talked to her sister, who was in your bed first. Because now the king has wandered away from Whitehall and back to the country, to the blunt-fingered cottar and his wife in apron and cap: the man who crosses himself and asks leave of the Pope before he pinches out the light and sombrely tups his spouse, her knees to the roof beams and his backside bobbing. Afterwards, this godly couple, they kneel by their bed: they join in prayer.