‘Well, it is my duty.’

‘Your duty?’ I want so much to know if my mother spoke of me in her last days that I hardly hear him.

‘I am married,’ he says. ‘Married. I thought I should tell you first, before you hear it from some gossip.’

‘I thought it was about my mother?’

‘Your mother? No. Why would it be about your mother? Why would I trouble myself about your mother? It is about me.’

‘You said bad news.’

‘What could be worse for you than to know that I have married another woman?’

Oh, a thousand things, a thousand things, I think, but I don’t say the thought aloud. The relief that my mother is alive rushes through me and I have to grip the arms of my chair to steady myself and to look as grave and as bereft as I know he will want me to look. ‘Married,’ I say flatly.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I am sorry for your loss.’

So it is indeed done. He will not return to me. I will never again be Queen of England. I cannot care for little Elizabeth, I cannot love Prince Edward, I cannot please my mother. It is indeed over. I have failed in what I was sent to do and I am sorry for it. But, dear God, I am safe from him, I shall never be in his bed again. It is indeed utterly finished and over. I have to keep my eyes down and my face still so that he does not see my beam of joy at this freedom.

‘To a lady of a most noble house,’ he continues. ‘Of the Norfolk house.’

‘Katherine Howard?’ I ask, before his boasting makes him look more ridiculous than I already think him.

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘I wish you much happiness,’ I say steadily. ‘She is . . .’ At that precise and dreadful moment I cannot find the English word. I want to say ‘charming’ but I cannot think of the word. ‘Young,’ I finish lamely.

He shoots me a quick, hard look. ‘That is no objection to me.’

‘None at all,’ I say quickly. ‘I meant to say, charming.’

He thaws. ‘She is charming,’ he agrees, smiling at me. ‘I know you liked her when she was in your rooms.’

‘I did,’ I say. ‘She was always pleasant company. She is a lovely girl.’ I nearly say ‘child’ but catch myself in time.

He nods. ‘She is my rose,’ he says. To my horror his eyes fill with the sentimental tears of an old bully. ‘She is my rose without a thorn,’ he says thickly. ‘I feel that I have found her at last, the woman I have waited for all my life.’

I sit in silence. This is an idea so bizarre that I cannot find any words, English or German, to reply. He has been waiting all his life? Well, he has not been waiting very patiently. During the time of his long vigil he has seen off three, no, four wives, me among them. And Katherine Howard is very far from a rose without a thorn. She is, if anything, a little daisy: delightful, sweet-faced, but ordinary. She must be the most common commoner ever to sit on a better woman’s throne.