Seven shilling the sack, and rising, Majesty. No. Because I was never in those parts. I will find a man if one can be got. St Wilfred, sir. He closes his eyes. ‘I believe the Scots razed it, and it was built up again in the time of the first Henry.’

‘Why does Luther think,’ the king demands, ‘that I should come into conformity with his church? Should he not think of coming into conformity with me?’

About St Lucy’s Day, Anne calls him in, taking him from the affairs of Cambridge University. But Lady Rochford is there to check him before he reaches her, put a hand on his arm. ‘She is a sorry sight. She cannot stop blubbing. Have you not heard? Her little dog is dead. We could not face telling her. We had to ask the king himself to do it.’

Purkoy? Her favourite? Jane Rochford conducts him in, glances at Anne. Poor lady: her eyes are cried to slits. ‘Do you know,’ Lady Rochford murmurs, ‘when she miscarried her last child, she did not shed a tear?’

The women skirt around Anne, keeping their distance as if she were barbed. He remembers what Gregory said: Anne is all elbows and points. You could not comfort her; even a hand extended, she would regard as a presumption, or a threat. Katherine is right. A queen is alone, whether in the loss of her husband, her spaniel or her child.

She turns her head: ‘Cremuel.’ She orders her women out: a vehement gesture, a child scaring crows. Unhurried, like bold corvines of some new and silky kind, the ladies gather their trains, flap languidly away; their voices, like voices from the air, trail behind them: their gossip broken off, their knowing cackles of laughter. Lady Rochford is the last to take wing, trailing her feathers, reluctant to yield the ground.

Now there is no one in the room but himself and Anne and her dwarf, humming in the corner, waggling her fingers before her face.

‘I am so sorry,’ he says, his eyes down. He knows better than to say, you can get another dog.

‘They found him –’ Anne throws out a hand, ‘out there. Down in the courtyard. The window was open above. His neck was broken.’

She does not say, he must have fallen. Because clearly this is not what she thinks. ‘Do you remember, you were here, that day my cousin Francis Bryan brought him from Calais? Francis walked in and I had Purkoy off his arm before you could blink. He was a creature who did no one harm. What monster would find it in their heart to pick him up and kill him?’

He wants to soothe her; she seems as torn, as injured, as if the attack had been on her person. ‘Probably he crept out on the sill and then his paws slipped. Those little dogs, you expect them to fall on their feet like a cat, but they don’t. I had a spaniel jumped out of my son’s arms because she saw a mouse, and she snapped her leg. It’s easily done.’