INSTANTLY, I BOWED AS LOW AS I COULD. After what had happened to Barak I had given Paget none of the deference due to him, but faced with the King I abased myself instinctively. I had time to take in only that he wore a long caftan, as on the day Lord Parr showed him to me from the window, and that his head with its grey wispy hair was bare.

There was a moment’s silence. The blood rushed to my head and I thought I might faint. But no one was permitted to rise and look the King in the face until he addressed them. I heard him laugh. It was a laboured, creaking sound, oddly reminiscent of Treasurer Rowland. Then he spoke, in that same unexpectedly high voice I remembered from my brief encounter with him at York, though underlain with a new, throaty creakiness. ‘So, Paget, my Master of Practices, he found you out. Someone has punched him in the face.’ That creaky laugh again.

‘There was a fight, I believe, your majesty, before Stice took him,’ Paget said.

‘Have you told him anything?’

‘Nothing, your majesty. You said you wished to do that.’

The King continued in the same quiet voice, though I discerned a threatening edge to it now. ‘Very well, Serjeant Matthew Shardlake, stand.’

I did so, my bruised face throbbing, and looked slowly up at the King. The pale bloated face was lined, full of pain and weariness. His grey beard, like his hair, was thin and wispy. His huge bulk strained against the satin arms of his chair, and his legs stuck out, swathed in thick bandages. But grotesque and even pitiable as he now was, Henry’s gaze remained terrifying. In the portrait outside it was the eyes which seemed most chilling, but in the living man it was the tight little mouth, straight and hard as a blade between the great jowls; angry, merciless. Looking at him my head swam for a second; it was as though none of this were real, and I was in some nightmare. I felt oddly disconnected, dizzy, and again I thought I might faint. Then in my mind’s eye I saw Barak’s hand fly through the air in a spray of blood, and I jerked convulsively.

The King held my gaze another moment, then turned and waved at Somers and the guard. ‘Will, top up my goblet, then take the guard and begone. One crookback at a time is enough.’

Somers poured wine from the flagon, the monkey clinging to his shoulder with practised ease. The King lifted the goblet to his mouth and I caught a glimpse of grey teeth. ‘God’s death,’ he murmured, ‘this endless thirst.’