I have known him for months now, half a lifetime. At first I only watched him but now he smiles and says hello to me. Once he called me by name. He comes with all the other young men of the household to visit us girls in our chamber, and he thinks he is in love with Joan Bulmer, who has eyes like a frog and if she were not so free with her favours, no man would ever look twice at her. But she is free, very free indeed; and so it is me that he does not look twice at. It isn’t fair. It’s so unfair. She is a good ten years older than me and married and so she knows how to attract a man, whereas I have much still to learn. Dereham is more than twenty as well. They all think of me as a child; but I am not a child, and I will show them. I am fourteen, I am ready for love. I am ready for a lover, and I am so in love with Francis Dereham that I will die if I don’t see him at once. Four hours and forty minutes.

But now, from today, everything must be different. Now that I am fourteen, everything is certain to change. It has to, I know it will. I shall put on my new French hood and I shall tell Francis Dereham that I am fourteen and he will see me as I truly am: a woman now, a woman of some experience, a woman grown; and then we shall see how long he stays with old froggy face when he could come across the room to lie in my bed instead.

He’s not my first love, it is true; but I never felt anything like this for Henry Manox and if he says I did, then he is a liar. Henry Manox was well-enough for me when I was a girl just living in the country, a child really, learning to play the virginal and knowing nothing of kissing and touching. Why, when he first kissed me I didn’t even like it very much, and begged him to stop, and when he put his hand up my skirt I was so shocked I screamed aloud and cried. I was only eleven years old, I couldn’t be expected to know the pleasures of a woman. But I know all about that now. Three years in the maids’ chamber has taught me every little wile and play that I need. I know what a man wants, and I know how to play him, and I know when to stop too.

My reputation is my dowry—my grandmother would point out that I have no other, sour old cat—and no-one will ever say that Katherine Howard does not know what is due to her and her family. I am a woman now, not a child. Henry Manox wanted to be my lover when I was a child in the country, when I knew next to nothing, when I had seen nobody, or at any rate nobody that mattered. I would have let him have me too, after he had bribed and bullied me for weeks to do the full deed, but in the end it was he that stopped short for fear of being caught. People would have thought badly of us since he was more than twenty and I was eleven. We were going to wait till I was thirteen. But now I live in Norfolk House in Lambeth, not buried in Sussex, and the king himself could ride past the door any day, the archbishop is our next-door neighbour, my own uncle Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, calls with all his great train, and he once remembered my name. I’m far beyond Henry Manox now. I’m not a country girl who can be bullied into giving him kisses and forced to do more, I am a good deal too high for that now. I know what’s what in the bedroom, I am a Howard girl, I have a wonderful future before me.