‘Grandmama has our flock on the South Downs,’ Katherine pipes up. ‘And the meat is so good, sire. I will ask her to send you some.’

‘Will you, pretty girl?’ he asks her. ‘And shall you cook it for me?’

She laughs. ‘I could try, sir.’

‘Now confess, you cannot dress a joint or make a sauce. I doubt you have ever been so much as inside a kitchen.’

‘If Your Grace wants me to cook for you, then I will learn,’ she says. ‘But I admit you might eat better with your own cooks.’

‘I am quite sure of it,’ he says. ‘And a pretty girl like you does not need to cook. I am sure you have other ways to enchant your husband.’

Their speech is too quick for me to quite follow but I am glad that my husband is merry and that Katherine has the way of managing him. She chatters to him like a little girl and he finds her amusing, as an old man might pet a favoured granddaughter.

I let them talk together, and go on looking around me. Our road now runs beside the wide, fast-flowing river which is busy with boatmen, barges of the noble families, wherry boats, barges of trade travelling laden into London, and fishermen with rods out for the good river fish. The watermeadows, still wet with the winter floods, are lush and shiny with pools of standing water. A great heron lifts up slowly from a mere as we go past and flaps his great wings and flies west before us, tucking his long legs up.

‘Is Hampton Court a little house?’ I ask.

The king spurs his horse forwards to talk to me. ‘A great house,’ he says. ‘The most beautiful house in the world.’

I doubt very much that the French king who built Fontainebleau or the Moors who built the Alhambra would agree, but since I have not seen either palace I won’t correct him. ‘Did you build it, Your Grace?’ I ask.

As soon as I speak I discover that it is once again the wrong thing to say. I thought it would encourage him to tell me about the planning and building of it; but his expression, which was so smiling and handsome, suddenly darkens. Little Katherine quickly answers.

‘It was built for the king,’ she says. ‘By an advisor who proved to be a false counsellor. The only good thing he did was make a palace fit for His Majesty. Or at least, that’s what my grandmother told me.’

His face lightens, he laughs aloud. ‘You speak truly, Mistress Howard, indeed, though you must have been a child when Wolsey betrayed me. He was a false counsellor and the house that he built and gave to me is a fine one.’ He turns to me. ‘It is mine now,’ he says less warmly. ‘That is all you need to know. And it is the finest house in the world.’

I nod and ride forwards. How many men have offended this king, in the long years of his rule? He drops back for a moment and speaks to his Master of Horse who is riding beside the young man Thomas Culpepper, talking and laughing together.