When he is gone, I should go too but, I do not leave. I walk around his room. When the room is quiet and no-one comes to the door, I draw back the chair. Then I sit behind his table in his big carved chair with the crest of the Howards, hard and uncomfortable behind my head. I wonder what it would have been like if George had lived and his uncle had died and George had been the great man of this family and I might have sat here, beside him, in my own right. We might have had matching chairs at this great table, and hatched our own plans, our own schemes. We might have made a great house of our own and raised our own children in it. We would have been brother and sister-in-law to the queen, our children would have been cousins to the next king. George would have been a duke for sure, I would have been a duchess. We would have been wealthy, the greatest family in the kingdom. We might have grown old together, he would have prized me for my advice and my fierce loyalty, I would have loved him for his passion and his good looks, and his wit. He would have turned to me, in the end he would surely have turned to me. He would have tired of Anne and her temper. He would have learned that a steady love, a faithful love, a wife’s love is the best.

But George died, and so did Anne, both of them dead before they could learn to value me. And all that is left of the three of us is me, the only survivor, wishing for the Boleyn inheritance, perching in the Howard chair, dreaming that they are still alive and that there is greatness before us, instead of loneliness and old age, petty plots and disgrace and death.

KATHERINE, WESTMINSTER PALACE,

APRIL 1540

I am on my way to the queen’s rooms just before dinner when I feel a gentle hand on my sleeve. I think at once that it is John Beresby or Tom Culpepper and I turn with a laugh, to tell him to let me go, when I see that it is the king, and I swoop into a curtsey.

He says, ‘You know me then,’ and I see that he is wearing a big hat and a big cape and thinks himself quite unrecognisable. I don’t say: you are the fattest man at court, of course I know you. You must be the only man who is six feet tall and more than four feet round. You are the only man who stinks like mouldy meat. I say: ‘Your Grace, oh, Your Grace, I think I would know you at any time, anywhere.’

He steps forwards, out of the shadows, and there is no-one else with him, which is extraordinary. Usually he has half a dozen men with him wherever he is. Whatever he is doing. ‘How do you know me?’ he asks.