‘This new is?’ she asks, patting the curtains that are swagged around the royal box.

‘No,’ I say, forced by my memories to tell the truth. ‘These are the curtains that are always used. Look, you can see.’ I turn the fabric over and she can see where other initials have been. They have cut the embroidery from the front of the curtains but left the old sewing at the back. Clearly one can see K and H, entwined with lovers’ knots. Oversewn, beside each H, is an H&A. It is like summoning a ghost to see her initials here again. These were the curtains which kept the sun from her head that May Day tournament when it was so hot, and we all knew that the king was angry, and we all knew that the king was in love with Jane Seymour, but none of us knew what would happen next.

I remember Anne leaning over the front of the box and dropping her handkerchief down to one of the jousters, shooting a sidelong smile at the king to see if he was jealous. I remember the cold look on his face and I remember she went pale and sat back again. He had the warrant for her arrest in his doublet then, at that very moment; but he said nothing. He was planning to send her to her death but he sat beside her for much of the day. She laughed and she chattered and she gave out her favours. She smiled at him and flirted and she had no idea he had made up his mind that she would die. How could he do such a thing to her? How could he? How could he sit beside her, with his new lover standing smiling, behind them both, and know that within days Anne would be dead? Dead, and my husband dead with her, my husband dying for her, my husband dying for love of her. God forgive me for my jealousy. God forgive her for her sins.

Seated in her place, her initials showing like a dark stain on the hidden underside of her curtains, I shudder as if someone has laid a cold finger on my neck. If any place is haunted it will be here. These curtains have been stitched and overstitched with the initials of three doomed, pretty girls. Will the court seamstresses be ripping out another A in a few years? Will this box host another ghost? Will another queen come after this new Anne?

‘What?’ she asks me, the new girl who knows nothing.

I point to the neat stitches. ‘K: Katherine of Aragon,’ I say simply. ‘A: Anne Boleyn. J: Jane Seymour.’ I turn the curtain right side round so that she can see her own initials standing proud and new on the fair side of the fabric. ‘And now, Anne of Cleves.’

She looks at me with her straight gaze and for the very first time I think that perhaps I have underestimated this girl. Perhaps she is not a fool. Perhaps behind that honest face there is quick intelligence. Because she cannot speak my language I have talked to her as if she is a child and I have thought of her with the wit of a child. But she is not frightened by these ghosts—she is not even haunted by them, as I am.