I never laugh. I think of my husband and his sister and any laughter dies in my mouth. I think of him promising to be her man through any trouble. I think of her, desperate to conceive a son, sure that Henry could not give her one. I think of the unholy pact they must have made. Then, with a little moan, I think that all this is my fear, my fantasy, and perhaps it never happened. The worst thing about the two of them being dead is that now I will never know what happened. The only way I have borne the thought of what they did, and the part I played, in all these years has been to put the thought far from me. I never think of it, I never speak of it, and no-one ever speaks of them in my hearing. It is as if they never were. That is the only way I can bear the fact that I am alive and they are gone: to pretend that they never were.

‘So when Queen Anne Boleyn was accused of treason did they really mean adultery?’ Katherine asks me.

The question, so sharp on the point of my own thinking, is like a stab. ‘What d’you mean?’ I ask.

We are riding from Collyweston to Ampthill on a bright, cold morning in October. The king is ahead, galloping with the young men of his court, thinking he is winning a race as they hold their horses back, Thomas Culpepper among them. Katherine is ambling along on her grey mare, and I am at her side on one of the Howard hunters. Everyone else has dropped back to gossip and there is no-one to shield me from her curiosity.

‘You said earlier that she and the other men were accused of adultery,’ she pursues.

‘That was months ago.’

‘I know, I have been thinking about it.’

‘You think very slowly,’ I say nastily.

‘I know I do,’ she says, quite unabashed. ‘And I have been thinking that they accused Anne Boleyn, my cousin, of treason only because she was unfaithful to the king, and they beheaded her.’ She glances around her. ‘And I have been thinking that I am in the same situation,’ she says. ‘That if anyone knew—they would say that I am unfaithful to the king. Perhaps they would call it treason too. Then what would happen to me?’

‘That is why we never say anything,’ I reply. ‘That is why we take care. Remember? I have warned you from the beginning to take care.’

‘But why did you help me meet Thomas? Knowing as you do what a danger it is? After your own sister-in-law was killed for just the same thing?’

I am lost for an answer. I never thought that she would ask me this question. But her stupidity is such that she does, sometimes, go straight to the most obvious. I turn my head as if I am looking over the cold meadows where the river, swollen with the recent rains, shines like a sword, a French sword.