‘Yes, but after that?’

‘Do you not see?’ He suddenly rounds on me. ‘The king is a man for favourites and for adversaries. When he has a Spanish wife we go to war with France. When he is married to a Boleyn he destroys the monasteries and the Pope with them. When he is married to a Seymour we Howards have to creep about and snatch up the crumbs under the table. When he has the Cleves woman we are all in thrall to Thomas Cromwell who made the match. Now it is our time again. Our girl is on the throne of England, everything that can be lifted is ours to carry away.’

‘But if everyone is our enemy?’ I suggest. ‘If our greed makes us enemies of everyone else?’

He bares his yellow teeth in a smile at me. ‘Everyone is always our enemy,’ he says. ‘But right now, we are winning.’

ANNE, HAMPTON COURT,

CHRISTMAS 1540

‘If it is to be done at all, it must be done with grace.’ This has become my motto, and as the barge comes upriver from Richmond, with the men on the wherries and the fishermen in their little boats doffing their caps when they see my standard and shouting out, ‘God bless Queen Anne!’ and sometimes other less polite encouragements, such as, ‘I’d have kept yer, dearie!’ and, ‘Try a Thamesman, why don’t yer?’ and worse than that, I smile and wave, repeating to myself again: ‘If it is to be done at all, it must be done with grace.’

The king cannot behave with grace; his selfishness and folly in this matter are too plain for everyone to see. The ambassadors of Spain and France must have laughed until they were sick over the excess of his wild vanity. Little Kitty Howard (Queen Katherine, I must, I will, remember to call her queen) cannot be expected to behave with grace. I might as well ask a puppy to be graceful. If he does not put her aside within the year, if she does not die in childbirth, then she may learn the grace of a queen . . . perhaps. But she doesn’t have it now. In truth, she wasn’t even a very good maid in waiting. Her manners were not fit for the queen’s rooms then; how will she ever suit the throne?

It has to be me who shows a little grace, if the three of us are not to become a laughing stock of the entire country. I will have to enter my old rooms at this, my favourite palace, as an honoured guest. I will have to bend the knee to the girl who now sits in my chair, I will have to address her as Queen Katherine without laughing, or crying, either. I will have to be, as the king has said I may be: his sister and his dearest friend.

That this gives me no protection from arrest and accusation at the whim of the king is as obvious to me as anyone else. He has arrested his own niece and imprisoned her in the old abbey of Syon. Clearly, kinship with the king gives no immunity from fear, friendship with the king gives no safety; as the man who built this very palace, Thomas Wolsey, could prove. But I, rowed steadily upriver, dressed in my best, looking a hundred times happier since the denial of my marriage, can perhaps survive these dangerous times, endure this dangerous proximity, and make a life for myself as a single woman in Henry’s kingdom which I plainly could not do as a wife.