I nod. ‘They serve him on bended knee now.’ I notice the new fashion.

He gives a short laugh. ‘And they call him “Majesty”,’ he says. ‘ “Your Grace” was good enough for the Plantaganets themselves; but not enough for this king. He has to be “Majesty” as if he were a god.’

‘People do this?’ I ask curiously. ‘This extreme honour?’

‘You will do it yourself,’ he tells me. ‘Henry will be as a god if he wishes, there is no-one who dares to deny him.’

‘The lords?’ I query, thinking of the pride of the great men of the kingdom who hailed this man’s father as an equal, whose loyalty gave him his throne.

‘You will see,’ my lord says grimly. ‘They have changed the laws of treason so that even to think of opposition is a capital offence. Nobody dares argue against him, there would be the knock on the door at midnight and a trip to the Tower for questioning and your wife a widow without even a trial.’

I look to the high table where the king is seated, a massive spreading bulk on his throne. He is cramming food into his mouth as we watch him, both hands up to his face, he is fatter than any man I have ever seen in my life before, his shoulders gross, his neck like an ox, his features dissolving into the moon-shaped vat of his face, fingers like swollen puddings.

‘My God, he has blown up like a monster!’ I exclaim. ‘What has become of him? Is he sick? I would not have known him. God knows he is not the prince he was.’

‘He is a danger,’ my lord says, his voice no more than a breath. ‘To himself in his indulgences, and to others in his temper. Be warned.’

I am shaken more than I show when I go to the table for the queen’s ladies. They make a space for me and greet me by name, many of them calling me cousin. I feel the king’s little piggy eyes on me and I sweep him a deep curtsey before I sit down on my stool. Nobody else pays any attention to the beast that the prince has become, it is like a fairytale and we are all blinded by an enchantment not to see the ruin of the man in this pig of a king.

I settle to my dinner and serve myself from the common platter, the best wine is poured into my cup. I look around the court. This is my home. I have known most of these people for all of my life, and thanks to the duke’s care in marrying all the Howard children to his own advantage, I am related to most of them. Like most of them, I have served one queen after another. Like most of them, I have followed my royal mistress in the fashion of hoods: gable hood, French hood, English hood; and in the fashion of praying: papist, reformist, English Catholic. I have stumbled in Spanish and I have chattered in French, and I have sat in thoughtful silence and sewed shirts for the poor. There is not much about the Queens of England that I have not known, that I have not seen. And soon I shall see the next one and know all about her: her secrets, her hopes, and her faults. I shall watch her and I shall make my reports to my lord duke. And perhaps, even in a court grown fearful under a king who is swelling into a tyrant, even without my husband, and even without Anne, I shall learn to be happy again.