He thinks he has bought me with this promise but I am sick of this life. ‘I can’t go on doing this,’ I say simply. I am thinking of Anne Boleyn, and of my husband, and of the two of them going into the Tower with all the evidence against them, and none of it true. I am thinking of them going to their death knowing that their family had borne witness against them, and their uncle passed the death sentence. I am thinking of them, trusting in me, waiting for me to come to give evidence for their defence, confident in my love for them, certain that I would save them. ‘I cannot go on doing this.’

‘I should hope not,’ he says primly. ‘Please God that you will never do it again. In my niece Katherine, the king has at last found a true and honourable wife. She is a rose without a thorn.’

‘A what?’

‘A rose without a thorn,’ the duke repeats. He keeps his face perfectly straight. ‘That is what we are to call her. That is what he wants us to call her.’

KATHERINE, NORFOLK HOUSE, LAMBETH,

JUNE 1540

Now, let me see, what do I have? I have the murderers’ houses that the king first gave me, and their lands. I have the jewels I earned by a quick squeeze in a quiet gallery. I have half a dozen gowns, paid for by my uncle, most of them new, and hoods to match. I have a bedchamber of my own at my grandmother’s house and my own presence chamber too, and a few maids in waiting but no ladies as yet. I buy dresses almost every day, the merchants come across the river with bolts of silk as if I were a dressmaker on my own account. They fit me with gowns and they mutter with their mouths filled with pins that I am the most beautiful, the most exquisite girl ever to be stitched into a too-tight stomacher. They bend to the floor to hem up my gown and say that they have never seen such a pretty girl, a very queen among girls.

I love it. If I were more thoughtful, or a graver soul, then I know I would be troubled by the thought of my poor mistress the queen and what will become of her, and the disagreeable thought that soon I shall marry a man who has buried three wives and maybe will bury his fourth, and is old enough to be my grandfather, as well as very smelly . . . but I cannot be troubled with such worries. The other wives did as they had to do, their lives ended as God and the king willed; it is really nothing to me. Even my cousin Anne Boleyn shall be nothing to me. I shall not think of her, nor of our uncle pushing her on to the throne and then pushing her on to the scaffold. She had her gowns and her court and her jewels. She had her time of being the finest young woman at court, she had her time of being the favourite of her family and the pride of us all; and now I shall have mine.