She frowns. ‘Years ago the king took a dreadful injury in his leg. The wound has never healed. You know that much, at least.’

‘Yes,’ I say sulkily. ‘Everyone knows that much.’

‘The wound has gone bad and has to be drained, every day the pus from the flesh has to be drained away.’

‘I know that,’ I say. ‘Don’t talk about it.’

‘Well, the wound has closed,’ she says.

‘That’s a good thing, isn’t it? It has healed? He is better.’

‘The wound closes over the top, but it is still bad underneath,’ she explains. ‘The poison cannot get away, it mounts to his belly, to his heart.’

‘No!’ I am quite shocked.

‘Last time this happened we feared that we might lose him,’ she says most seriously. ‘His face went black as a poisoned corpse, he lay like a dead man until they opened the wound again and drained off the poison.’

‘How do they open it?’ I ask. ‘You know, this is really disgusting.’

‘They cut into it and then they hold it open,’ she says. ‘They wedge it open with little chips of gold. They have to push the chips into the wound to keep it raw, otherwise it will close over. He has to bear the pain of an open wound all the time, and they will have to do it again. Cut into his leg and then cut again.’

‘Then he will be well again?’ I ask brightly, I really want her to stop telling me these things.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Then he will be as he was, lame and in pain, and being poisoned by it. The pain makes him angry and, worse than that, it makes him feel old and weary. The lameness means he cannot be the man he was. You helped him to feel young again, but now the wound reminds him that he is an old man.’

‘He can’t really have thought he was young. He can’t have thought he was young and handsome. Not even he can have thought that.’

She looks at me seriously. ‘Oh, Katherine, he did think he was young and in love. He has to be made to think that again.’

‘But what can I do?’ I can feel myself pouting. ‘I cannot put ideas in his head. Besides, he does not come to my bed while he is ill.’

‘You will have to go to him,’ she says. ‘Go to him and make something up that will make him feel young and in love again. Make him feel like a young man, filled with lust.’

I frown. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘What would you do if he were a young man?’

‘I could tell him that one of the young men of the court is in love with me,’ I suggest. ‘I could make him jealous. There are young men here,’ I am thinking of Thomas Culpepper, ‘that I know I could really, truly desire.’

‘Never,’ she says urgently. ‘Never do that. You don’t know how dangerous it is to do that.’