‘Ingrates,’ he agrees. ‘Natural liars. I’ve found it myself. I would rather the Italians. The Florentines, so modest. The Venetians, transparent in all their dealing. And your own race, the Spaniards. Such an honest people. They used to say of your royal father Ferdinand, that his open heart would undo him.’

‘You are amusing yourself,’ she says, ‘at the expense of a dying woman.’

‘You want a great deal of credit for dying. You offer guarantees on the one hand, you want privileges on the other.’

‘A state such as mine, it usually buys kindness.’

‘I am trying to be kind, but you do not see it. At the last, madam, can you not put your own will aside, and for the sake of your daughter, reconcile with the king? If you leave this world at odds with him, blame will be visited on her. And she is young and has her life to live.’

‘He will not blame Mary. I know the king. He is not so mean a man.’

He is silent. She still loves her husband, he thinks: in some kink or crevice of her old leathern heart, she is still hoping for his footstep, his voice. And with his gift to her hand, how can she forget that he once loved her? After all, there must have been weeks of work in the silk roses, he must have ordered them long before he knew the child was a boy. ‘We called him the New Year’s prince,’ Wolsey had said. ‘He lived fifty-two days, and I counted every one.’ England in winter: the pall of sliding snow, blanketing the fields and palace roofs, smothering tile and gable, slipping silent over window glass; feathering the rutted tracks, weighting the boughs of oak and yew, sealing the fishes under ice and freezing the bird to the branch. He imagines the cradle, curtained in crimson, gilded with the arms of England: the rockers huddled into their clothes: a brazier burning and the air fresh with the New Year scents of cinnamon and juniper. The roses brought to her triumphant bedside – how? In a gilded basket? In a long box like a coffin, a casket inlaid with polished shells? Or tumbled to her coverlet from a silk sheath embroidered with pomegranates? Two happy months pass. The child thrives. It is understood through the world that the Tudors have an heir. And then on the fifty-second day, a silence behind a curtain: a breath, not a breath. The women of the chamber snatch up the prince, crying in shock and fear; hopelessly crossing themselves, they cower by the cradle to pray.

‘I will see what can be done,’ he says. ‘About your daughter. About a visit.’ How perilous can it be to bring one little girl across country? ‘I do think the king would permit it, if you would advise Lady Mary to be in all respect conformable to his will, and recognise him, as now she does not, as head of the church.’