Katherine runs to him when he wants her and she shies away when his temper is bad as if she were one of his pretty greyhounds; but the strain must tell on her in time. And she has surrounded herself with the silliest and most vulgar girls that were ever allowed in a gentleman’s house. Their dress is incredibly ostentatious with as much bare flesh and jewels as they can afford; their manners are bad. They are sober enough when the king is awake and in the court, they parade before him and bow to him as if he were a brooding idol; but the moment he is gone they run wild like schoolgirls. Kitty does nothing to control them, indeed, when the doors of her rooms are shut, she is the ringleader. They have pages and young men of the court running in and out of her rooms all day, musicians playing, gambling, drinking, flirting. She herself is little more than a child and it is a great joy to her to have a water fight in a priceless gown and then change into another. But the people about her are older and less innocent and the court is becoming lax, perhaps worse. There is a great scurry into decorum when someone dashes in and says the king is coming, which Kitty adores, the schoolchild that she is; but this is now a court without discipline. It is becoming a court without morals.

It is hard to predict what will happen. She said she was with child in the first month of marriage, but she was mistaken; she seems to have no idea how grave a mistake this can be, and there have been no hopes since. As I came away the wound on the king’s leg was giving him terrible pain and he had taken to his bed again, seeing nobody. Kitty tells me that she thinks he cannot give her a child, that he is with her as he was with me, incapable. She tells me that she works such tricks on him that he has some pleasure, and she assures him that he is potent and strong, but the reality of the matter is that he rarely manages the act.

‘We pretend,’ she told me miserably. ‘I sigh and groan and say it is such bliss for me, and he tries to thrust, but, truth be told, he cannot move, it is a pathetic mime he does, not the real thing.’

I told her that she should not speak of this to me. But she asked me, very trustingly, who should advise her? I shook my head. ‘You can trust no-one,’ I said. ‘They would have had me hanged for a witch if I had said half what you have told me. If you say the king is impotent, or you predict his death, that is treason, Kitty. The sentence for treason is death. You must never speak of this to anyone, and if anyone asks me did you speak to me, I shall lie for you and say you did not.’