I shrug my shoulders. ‘My lord uncle. How should I know?’

‘Because you are here to know!’ he shouts at me. ‘You are put at court and kept at court and dressed and fed at court so that you shall know everything, and so that you shall tell me! If you know nothing, what is the point of you being here? What was the point of sparing you from the scaffold?’

I feel my face grow stiff with fear at his anger. ‘I know what goes on in the queen’s rooms,’ I say softly. ‘I cannot know what happens in the Privy Council.’

‘You dare to say that I should know? That I am remiss?’

Mutely, I shake my head.

‘How should anybody know what the king thinks when he keeps his own counsel and rewards the man whose face he has been slapping in public for the past three months? How should anyone know what is happening when Cromwell is blamed for the worst marriage the king has ever made and is now to lord it around us as earl, as damned Earl of damned-to-hell Essex?’

I find that I am pressed back against the wall and the silky feel of the tapestry is behind my outspread hands. I can feel the fabric grow damp with my cold sweat.

‘How is anybody to know what the hell is in the king’s mind when he is by turns as cunning as a crow and as mad as a hare?’

I shake my head in silence. That he should name the king in the same breath as madness is as good as treason. I will not repeat it even here, safe in Howard rooms.

‘At any rate, you are sure that he still likes Katherine?’ the duke says more quietly.

‘Hotly. There is no doubt in my mind.’

‘Well, tell her to keep him at arm’s length. We gain nothing if she becomes his whore, but he stays married to the queen.’

‘There can be no doubt . . .’

‘I doubt everything,’ he says flatly. ‘And if he beds her and then beds the queen and gets a son on her and thanks Cromwell for the addition to his nursery then we are ruined, along with the little slut.’

‘He will not bed the queen,’ I say, returning to my only certainty.

‘You don’t know anything,’ he says rudely. ‘All you know is what can be gleaned from keyholes and privy chamber whispers, out of the chamber sweepings and the midden. You know everything that can be found in the dirt of life, you know nothing of policy. I tell you, he is rewarding Cromwell with rank beyond his dreams for bringing him the Cleves queen; and your plans and my plans are all thrown down. And you are a fool.’

There is nothing I can say to this so I wait for him to tell me to leave, but he turns to the window and pauses, looking out and gnawing his thumbnail. After a little while a page comes to tell him that he is required at the House of Lords and he goes out without another word to me. I curtsey, but I don’t think he even sees me.