Perhaps Lady Margaret thought that Katherine would intercede for them before they were caught and that she could be persuasive enough. Perhaps the lovers thought that the king, rising out of his sickbed, returning to wallow in his own uxorious joy, would be forgiving to other lovers, to other Howard lovers. They are sadly mistaken. The king speaks his mind briefly and to the point and then strides out of her room. Katherine comes running after, white as her collar, flooded with tears, and says that the king is scenting plots and conspiracies and lush unchastity at the court of his rose, and he is blaming her.

‘What shall I do?’ she demands. ‘He asks if I cannot keep control of my ladies. How should I know how to keep control of my ladies? How should I command his own niece? She is the daughter of the Queen of Scotland, she is royal and six years older than me. Why would she ever listen to me? What can I do? He says he is disappointed in me and that he will punish her, he says the two of them will face his extreme displeasure. What can I do?’

‘Nothing,’ I tell her. ‘You can do nothing to save her.’ What can be easier to understand than this?

‘I cannot let my own brother be sent to the Tower!’

She says this, unthinking, to the woman, me, who saw her own husband go to the Tower. ‘I’ve seen worse happen,’ I say dryly.

‘Oh then, yes.’ She flaps her hand dismissively and twenty diamonds catch the light and dazzle away the ghosts of them, Anne and George, going to the Tower without a word to save them. ‘Never mind then! What about now? This is Lady Margaret, my friend, and Charles, my own brother. They will expect me to save them.’

‘If you so much as admit that you knew they were meddling with each other then it could be you in the Tower as well as them,’ I warn her. ‘He is against it now, you had better pretend you knew nothing of it. Why can you not understand this? Why should Lady Margaret be such a fool? The king’s ward cannot bestow her favours where she wishes. And the king’s wife cannot put her own brother into bed with a royal. We all know this. It was a gamble, a great and reckless gamble, and it has failed. Lady Margaret must be mad to risk her life for this. You would be mad to condone it.’

‘But if she is in love?’

‘Is love worth dying for?’

That stops her romantic little ballad. She gives a little shudder. ‘No, never. Of course not. But the king cannot behead her for falling in love with a man of good family and marrying him?’

‘No,’ I say harshly. ‘He will behead her lover; so you had better say farewell to your brother and make sure that you never speak with him again unless you want the king to think you are in a plot to supplant him with Howards.’