“Good-bye,” he says. “Just for a little while, beloved. I shall come back to you. Don’t fear for me.”

“I will fear for you,” I insist. “Promise that you will write to me often to tell me how you are and how you are doing?”

“I promise,” he says. “I know that I leave the country in safe hands with you as regent.”

It is a great responsibility, the greatest that an Englishman could accept. And to give it to an Englishwoman is greater still. “I won’t fail you,” I say.

He bows his head for my blessing and then, leaning on a page for support and hauling himself upward, he goes up the gangplank. He turns into the royal cabin, I see the door closed on his bulky silhouette, and the guards take up their posts.

At the stern of the barge, standing behind the steersman, I see Thomas Seymour. He, too, is going to war, and, I know, into far greater danger. As the drum starts to beat and they cast off the ropes, as the oars dip in the water and the barge yields to the pull and glides away from the quayside, the man that I adore exchanges one dark glance with me and then he turns away. I don’t even mouth “God bless you” or “Keep safe.” I hold up my hand to wave to the king and then I turn away too.

HAMPTON COURT PALACE,

SUMMER 1544

It is the most beautiful weather, sunny and bright and hot every day, and I wake alone in my own bed every morning in my rebuilt rooms on the southeast corner of the base court, overlooking the pond gardens facing south, far from ghosts, reveling in the satisfaction of my own company.

I have the three royal children with me, and every morning I wake to such pleasure in knowing that they are all three under the same roof, that we will pray in the same chapel, that we will eat breakfast in the great hall, and spend the day together in study and in play. Edward is living with his sisters for the first time in his lonely little life. I have gathered all three of them around me as no queen has been allowed to do before. I have everything that could make a woman happy, and I am Regent General of England. Everything shall be as I decide, nobody can even argue with me. The children are with me because I say that it shall be so. There is nobody who can take Edward away from this: his family; from me: his stepmother. We will stay here, in the most beautiful of all the English palaces, because it is my choice, and later—when I choose and not before—we will go on a progress of pleasure, hunting and sailing and riding up the Thames valley, myself and the children and those of the court that I want with me.