‘He’s missing Queen Anne,’ Agnes Restwold says, because she is a spiteful cat.

‘He is not,’ I say flatly. ‘Why should he? He put her aside by his own choice.’

‘He is,’ she insists. ‘For see? As soon as she went away he went quiet, and then he became ill and now see, he has withdrawn from court to think about what he can do, and how he might get her back.’

‘It’s a lie,’ I say. It is a terrible thing to say to me. Who should know better than me that you can love someone and then wake up and scarcely be troubled with them? I thought that was just me and my shallow heart, as my grandmother says. But what if the king has a shallow heart too? What if he thought—actually as I did, as obviously everyone did—that she had never looked better or appeared better? Everything about her that had been so foreign and stupid was somehow smoothed away and she was—I don’t know the word—gracious. She was like a real queen and I was, like I always am, the prettiest girl in the room. I always am the prettiest girl in the room. But I am only that. I am never more than that. What if he now wants a woman with grace?

‘Agnes, you do wrong to presume on your long friendship with Her Grace to distress her,’ Lady Rochford says. I adore how she can say things like that. The words are as good as a play and her tone is like a shower of February rain down your neck. ‘This is idle gossip about the king’s ill health for which we should be praying.’

‘I do pray,’ I say quickly, for everyone says I go into chapel and spend all my time craning my head over the edge of the queen’s box to see Thomas Culpepper, who glances up at me and smiles. His smile is the best thing in church, it lights up the chapel like a miracle. ‘I do pray. And when it is Lent, God knows, I will have nothing to do but pray.’

Lady Rochford nods. ‘Indeed, we shall all pray for the king’s health.’

‘But why? Is he so very ill?’ I ask her quietly, so that Agnes and the rest of them can’t hear. Sometimes I wish indeed that I had never allowed them all to join me. They were good enough for the maids’ chamber at Lambeth but really, I don’t think they always behave as proper ladies at the queen’s court. I am sure Queen Anne never had a rowdy ladies’ room like mine. Her ladies were better behaved by far. We would never have dared to speak to her as my ladies speak to me.

‘The wound on his leg has closed up again,’ Lady Rochford says. ‘Surely you were listening when the physician explained it?’

‘I didn’t understand,’ I say. ‘I started listening; but then I didn’t understand. I just stopped hearing the words.’