Anyway, perhaps it is not so bad. This morning he has sent me a present, a gift of rich sables, very expensive and very high quality. Little Katherine Howard, who is so sweet that she mistook the king for a stranger and greeted him kindly, has had a brooch of gold from him. Sir Anthony Browne brought the gifts this morning with a pretty speech, and told me that the king has gone ahead to prepare for our official meeting, which will happen at a place called Blackheath, outside the City of London. My ladies say that there will be no surprises between now and then, so I need not be on my guard. They say that this disguising is a favourite game of the king’s and once we are married I must be prepared for him to come wearing a false beard or a big hat and ask me to dance, and we will all pretend not to know him. I smile and say how charming, though in truth I am thinking: how odd, and how childlike, and really, how very vain of him, how foolishly vain to hope that people will fall in love with him on sight as a common man, when he looks as he does now. Perhaps when he was young and handsome he could go about in disguise and people would welcome him for his good looks and charm; but surely, for many years now, many years, people must have only pretended to admire him? But I don’t speak my thoughts. It is better that I say nothing now, having spoiled the game once already.

The girl who saved the day by greeting him so politely, little Katherine Howard, is one of my new maids in waiting. I call her to me in the bustle of departing this morning, and I thank her, as best I can manage in English, for her help.

She dips a little curtsey, and speaks to me in a rattle of English.

‘She says that she is delighted to serve you,’ my translator, Lotte, tells me. ‘And that she has not been to court before, so she did not recognise the king either.’

‘Why then did she speak to a stranger who had come without invitation?’ I ask, puzzled. ‘Surely, she should have ignored him? Such a rude man, pushing his way in?’

Lotte turns this into English, and I see the girl look at me as if there is more that divides us than language, as if we are on different worlds, as if I come from the snows and fly on white wings.

‘Was?’ I ask in German. I spread out my hands to her and raise my eyebrows. ‘What?’

She steps a little closer, she whispers in Lotte’s ear without ever taking her eyes from my face. She is such a pretty little thing, like a doll, and so earnest, that I cannot help smiling.

Lotte turns to me, she is near to laughing. ‘She says that of course she knew it was the king. Who else would be able to get into the chamber past the guards? Who else is so tall and fat? But the game of the court is to pretend not to know him, and to address him only because he is such a handsome stranger. She says she may be only fourteen, and her grandmother says she is a dolt; but already she knows that every man in England loves to be admired, indeed, the older they are the vainer they get, and surely, men are not so different in Cleves?’