‘Who is it?’ I ask. Foolish, but I find I have caught my breath, like a girl. If I were to be married soon, it is not impossible but that I could have another child. If I were to be married to some great man I could lay down the foundation of a great family, build a big house, amass a fortune to hand down to my own heirs. I could do better than the Boleyns did. I could see my family rise. I could leave a fortune; and the shame and distress of my first marriage would be forgotten in the glamour of my second.

‘You will have to be patient,’ he says. ‘Let’s get this business with Katherine settled first.’

KATHERINE, HAMPTON COURT,

APRIL 1541

It is springtime. I have never noticed a season so much in my life before; but this year the sun is so bright and the birdsong so loud that I wake at dawn and I lie awake with every inch of my skin like silk, and my lips moist, and my heart thudding with desire. I want to laugh without cause, I want to give my ladies little gifts to make them happy. I want to dance, I want to run down the long allées of the garden and twirl around at the bottom and fall on the grass and smell the pale scent of the primroses. I want to ride all day and dance all night and gamble the king’s fortune away. I have an enormous appetite, I taste all the dishes that come to the royal table and then I send the best, the very best, to one table or another; but never, never to his.

I have a secret, it is a secret so great that some days I think I can hardly breathe for the way it burns on my tongue, hot for telling. Some days it is like a tickle that makes me want to laugh. Every day, every night and day, it is like the warm, insistent pulse of lust.

One person knows it, only one. He looks at me during Mass when I peer over the balcony of the queen’s box and see him down below. Slowly, slowly his head turns as if he can feel my gaze on him, he looks up, he gives me that smile, the one that starts at his blue eyes and then moves to his kissable mouth, and then he gives me the cheekiest, quickest flash of a wink. Because he knows the secret.

When we are riding, his horse comes alongside mine in the hunt and his bare hand brushes my glove and it is as if I am scalded by his touch. I dare not even look at him then, he does no more than this, the gentlest touch, just to tell me that he knows the secret; he knows the secret too.

And when we are dancing and the steps bring us together and we are handclasped and we should, according to the rules of the dance, lock gazes as we go round, then we drop our eyes, or look away, or seem quite indifferent. Because we dare not be too close, I dare not have my face near his, I dare not look at his eyes, his warm mouth, the temptation of his smile.