And always, like my good angel, Lady Rochford is there, waiting for me. She understands how it is, she knows what I have to do and how, some nights, it leaves me feeling irritable and sore. She has a cup of hot mead and some little cakes ready for me, she seats me in a chair by the fire and puts the warm cup in my hand, and brushes my hair slowly and sweetly until the anger passes and I am calm again.

‘When you get a son you will be free of him,’ she whispers so quietly that I can hardly hear her. ‘When you are sure you have conceived a child he will leave you alone. No more false alarms. When you tell him you are with child you must be certain, and then you will have nearly a year at peace. And after you have had a second son your place will be assured and you can take your own pleasures and he will not know and not mind.’

‘I shall never have pleasure again,’ I say miserably. ‘My life is over before it has even begun. I am only fifteen and I am tired of everything.’

Her hands caress my shoulders. ‘Oh, you will,’ she says certainly. ‘Life is long, and if a woman survives she can take her pleasures one way or another.’

JANE BOLEYN, WINDSOR PALACE,

OCTOBER 1540

Supervising this privy chamber is no sinecure, I must say. Under my command I have girls who in any decent town would be whipped at the cart tail for whores. Katherine’s chosen friends from Lambeth are without doubt the rowdiest sluts that ever came from a noble household where the lady of the house could not be troubled to mind them. Katherine has insisted that her friends from the old days should be invited to her privy chamber and I can hardly refuse, especially since the senior ladies of her privy chamber are no company for her, but are mostly old enough to be her mother and have been foisted on her by her uncle. She needs some friends of her own age but these chosen companions are not biddable girls from good families, they are women, lax women, the very companions who let her run wild and set her the worst example, and they will go on with their loose ways too if they can, even in the royal rooms. It is utterly unlike Queen Anne’s rule, and soon everyone will notice. I cannot imagine what my lord duke is thinking, and the king will give his child-bride anything she asks. But a queen’s chamber should be the finest, most elegant place in the land, not a tiltyard for rough girls with the language of the stables.

Her liking for Katherine Tylney and Margaret Morton I can understand, though they are equally loud-mouthed and bawdy; and Agnes Restwold was a confidante from the old days. But I don’t believe she wanted Joan Bulmer to come into her service. She never mentioned her name once; but the woman wrote a secret letter and seems to have left her husband and wheedled her way in, and Katherine is either too kind-hearted, or too fearful of what secrets the woman might spill, to refuse her.