I curtsey and say nothing. There is no point in arguing with my lady grandmother, she has such a temper she can send me from the room in a moment if I so much as open my mouth. I really do think I am very cruelly treated.

‘And what’s this I hear about you and young Master Dereham?’ she suddenly asks. ‘I thought I had warned you once already?’

‘I don’t know what you hear, Grandmother,’ I say cleverly.

Too clever for her, because she raps my hand with her fan.

‘Don’t forget who you are, Katherine Howard,’ she says sharply. ‘When your uncle sends for you to wait on the queen, I take it you will not want to refuse because of some greensick flirtation?’

‘Wait on the queen?’ I go at once to the most important thing.

‘Perhaps,’ she says maddeningly. ‘Perhaps she will have need of a maid in waiting if the girl has been gently raised and is not known to be an utter slut.’

I cannot speak, I am so desperate. ‘Grandmother . . . I . . .’

‘Never mind,’ she says and waves me away back to the dancers. I clutch at her sleeve and beg to know more; but she laughs and sends me to dance. As she is watching me, I hop about like a little wooden doll, I am so correct in the steps and so polite in my deportment that you would think I had a crown on my head myself. I dance like a nun, I dance like a vestal virgin, and when I look up to see if she is impressed by my modesty she is laughing at me.

So that night, when Francis comes to the chamber door, I meet him on the threshold. ‘You can’t come in,’ I say bluntly. ‘My lady grandmother knows all about us. She warned me for my reputation.’

He looks shocked. ‘But my love . . .’

‘I can’t risk it,’ I insist. ‘She knows far more than we thought. God knows what she has heard or who has told her.’

‘We would not deny each other,’ he says.

‘No,’ I say uncertainly.

‘If she asks you, you must tell her that we are married in the eyes of God.’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘And I shall come to you as your husband now.’

‘You can’t.’ Nothing in this world is going to prevent me from being the new queen’s maid in waiting. Not even my undying love for Francis.

He puts his hand around my waist and nibbles at the nape of my neck. ‘I shall be going to Ireland within days,’ he whispers softly. ‘You will not send me away with my heart breaking.’

I hesitate. It would be very sad for his heart to break, but I have to be maid in waiting to the new queen, there is nothing more important than that.

‘I don’t want your heart to break,’ I say. ‘But I have to take a post in the queen’s household, and who knows what might happen?’