‘I hope you will be very happy,’ I say again.

He leans towards me. ‘And I think we will have a child,’ he whispers. ‘Hush. It’s early days yet. But she is so very young, and she comes from fertile stock. She says she thinks it is so.’

I nod. His smug confiding to me, who was bought and put in his bed to endure him labouring hopelessly above me, pushing himself against me, patting my stomach and pulling at my breasts, repels me so much I can hardly congratulate him on achieving with a girl what he failed to do with me.

‘So let us dine,’ he says, releasing me from my embarrassment, and we rise and he takes my hand as if we were still married, and leads me into the great hall of Richmond Palace, which was his father’s favourite new-built palace and is now mine. He seats himself alone, on a throne raised higher than any other, and I am seated not at his side—as I was when I was queen—but down the hall at a little distance, as if to remind the world that everything has changed and that I will never sit at his side as queen again.

I don’t need reminding. I know this.

KATHERINE, HAMPTON COURT,

AUGUST 1540

Now let me see, what do I have?

I have eight new gowns ready made and another forty (forty! I can’t believe it myself!) in the making and I am very displeased the dressmakers are so late with them, for it is my intention to wear a different gown to dinner every day of my life from now until the day I die, and to change my gown three times a day. That would be three new gowns a day which would be hundreds a year and since I may live till fifty years old that will be . . . well, I can’t work it out but it is very many indeed. Thousands.

I have a collar of diamonds with matching cuffs of diamonds and gold and a matching set of earrings.

I have sables, like she had for her present, and they are better than hers, thicker and of a glossier pelt. I asked Lady Rochford and she definitely confirmed that they are better than hers. So that is one worry gone from my mind.

I have my own barge (think of it!), my own barge with my own motto engraved on it. Yes, I have a motto too, and it is ‘No other will but his’, which my uncle devised and my grandmother said was laying it on by the bucket; but the king likes it and says it was just what he was thinking. I didn’t quite understand it at first but it means that I have no other will than his—that is, the king’s will. Once I understood that, I saw at once why any man would like it, if he were fool enough to believe that anyone would devote their entire body and soul to another.