I don’t know what she would think about a husband and wife lying together in Lent, and then it makes me giggle thinking of asking her. Just asking her would be shocking! If only she knew where love had brought me; if only she might have known love herself. “Learn you to die!” makes my heart ache for her, and I want to tell her: “No! No! I have learned to love; and it is like a miracle from another world whereas dying is so earthly.” Without her advice, and easily persuaded by the urgency of desire and my lust for life, I decide to lie with my husband through fast days and holy days alike, Sundays included. I don’t care! I will lie with him through the forty days of Lent and assume that, along with purgatory and with confessors, that sin has gone too.

“But do you not have your course?” Janey asks me when I tell her of my theological wrestlings with the old teaching of the Church and my own new reformist preference.

“No,” I say vaguely. “I don’t think I have had it since December.”

“You haven’t?” She is suddenly attentive.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“But now it is nearly March!” she exclaims.

“I know, but you haven’t had yours either,” I say. “I know because we had it at the same time, just before Christmas, do you remember?”

She flaps her hands dismissively. “I am ill! You know I am ill, and I often miss my course. But it hardly matters with me! Obviously, it means nothing. But you are eating well and you are perfectly well and newly married, and now you have missed a course. Katherine! Don’t you see? You might be with child!”

I look at her, quite aghast. “With child?”

“How wonderful!” she says. “If it’s a boy, he will be the next King of England! Think of it!”

“With child?” I repeat, amazed.

“I have prayed for it, and now I will see it!” she says. “Please God I live long enough!”

“Why would you not live long enough?” Everything she says only confuses me more. “Surely any baby would be born this year? Or will it be next year? How does one tell?”

“Oh, who cares? You must tell Ned.”

“I must,” I say. “Whatever will he say?”

“He will be delighted,” she says with certainty. “What man would not be delighted that his wife has the heir to the throne in her belly?”

I feel as if everything is going far too fast for me. “I had not thought to have a child so soon, at any rate, not until everyone knew that we were married.”

“What did you think would happen, bedding him every moment that you can?” She looks at me as if I am a fool, and I feel very foolish.

“But how does one know it has happened?”