‘No,’ I say. ‘I told you. I don’t like boys. They are all too silly.’

‘You don’t like boys?’

‘Not at all.’

‘So what do you like?’ he asks. His voice is lilting with admiration of himself. He knows the reply in this song.

‘I daren’t say.’ His hand is creeping up from my waist again, in a moment he will be fondling my breast. Oh, Thomas Culpepper, I wish to God this was you.

‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘Oh, tell me, pretty Katherine, and I will give you a present for being an honest girl.’

I snatch a quick breath of clean air. ‘I like you,’ I say simply, and one hand clamps—smack—on my breast and the other pulls me towards him and his mouth comes down on mine, all wet and sucking, and it is really very horrible; but on the other hand I have to wonder what present I get for being an honest girl.

* * *

He gives me the estates of two convicted murderers: that is, a couple of houses and some goods, and some money. I can’t believe it. That I should have houses, two houses, and land, and money of my own!

I have never had such wealth in my life, and never any gift so easily earned. I have to acknowledge: it was easily earned. It is not nice to lead on a man who is old enough to be my father, almost old enough to be my grandfather. It is not very nice to have his fat hand rubbing at my breasts and his stinking mouth all over my face. But I must remember that he is the king, and he is a kind old man and a sweet, doting old man, and I can close my eyes most of the time and pretend that it is someone else. Also, it is not very nice to have dead men’s goods, but when I say this to Lady Rochford she points out that we all have dead men’s goods one way or another, everything is either stolen or inherited, and a woman who hopes to rise in the world can’t afford to be particular.

ANNE, WESTMINSTER PALACE,

APRIL 1540

I thought that I would be crowned as part of the May Day celebrations but we are already less than a month away and no-one has ordered any gowns or planned the order of the coronation, so I begin to think it won’t be this May Day, it can’t be. In the absence of any better advisor I wait until the Princess Mary and I are walking back from the Lady Chapel to the palace, and I ask her what she thinks. I have grown to like her more and more and trust her opinion. Also, because she has been the child and then the exile of this court, she knows better than most what it is to live here and yet know yourself to be an outsider.

At the very word ‘coronation’ she gives me a quick look of such concern that I cannot take another step. I freeze to the spot and cry: ‘Oh, what have you heard?’