‘Dear Anne, don’t cry,’ she says quickly. ‘I beg your pardon. Queen Anne.’

‘I’m not crying.’ I show her my shocked face. ‘I am not.’

At once we both look round to see if anyone is watching us. This is how it is at court, always the glance over your shoulder for the spy; truth told only in whispers. She steps closer to me and I take her hand and put it through my arm and we walk together.

‘It can’t be this May Day because we would have had everything planned and ready by now if he was going to crown you,’ she says. ‘I thought that in Lent, myself. But it’s not so bad. It means nothing. Queen Jane wasn’t crowned either. He would have crowned her if she had lived, once she had given him an heir. He will be waiting for you to tell him that you are with child. He will be waiting for you to have a child and then there will be the christening and then your coronation after that.’

I flush deeply at this and say nothing. She takes a glance at my face and waits until we have gone up the stairs, through my presence chamber, through my privy chamber and to my little withdrawing chamber where nobody comes without invitation. I close the door on the curious faces of my ladies and we are alone.

‘There is a difficulty?’ she says with careful tact.

‘Not of my making.’

She nods but neither of us wants to say more. We are both virgins in our mid-twenties, old for spinsters, afraid of the mystery of male desire, afraid of the power of the king, both living on the edge of his acceptance.

‘You know, I hate May Day,’ she says suddenly.

‘I thought it was one of the greatest days of celebration of the year?’

‘Oh, yes, but it is a savage celebration, pagan: not a Christian one.’

This is part of her Papist superstition and I am going to laugh for a moment but the gravity of her face stops me.

‘It’s just to welcome the coming of spring,’ I say. ‘There is no harm in it.’

‘It is the time for putting off the old and taking on the new,’ she says. ‘That’s the tradition and the king lives it to the full, like a savage. He rode in a May Day tournament with a love message to Anne Boleyn on his standard, and then he put my mother aside for the Lady Anne on a May Day. Less than five years later, it was her turn: the Lady Anne was the new Queen of the Joust, with her champions fighting for her honour before her royal box. But the knights were arrested that afternoon and the king rode away from her without even saying goodbye, and that was the end of the Lady Anne, and the last time she saw him.’

‘He didn’t say goodbye?’ For some reason, this seems to me the worst thing of all. No-one had told me this before.