I gesture to Anne Boleyn’s crown that sits heavily on my head. “I’m not dressed for dancing,” I say. “I thought I would sit and watch the dancers with you.”

“You must dance!” he says instantly. “There is no more beautiful woman at court than you. I want to see my wife dance. I haven’t come home to see you sit on a chair. It will be no celebration for me if you don’t dance, Kateryn.”

“Shall I go and change into my headdress?”

“Yes, go,” he says. “And come quickly back.”

I nod to Nan, who summons two maids-in-waiting with a snap of her fingers, and I go out through the door behind our thrones into the little lobby. “He wants me to change my crown for a headdress so that I can dance,” I say wearily. “I have to dance.”

“Girls, run and get Her Majesty’s golden hood from her dressing room,” Nan says. The girls run off, and Nan tuts. “I should have told them to bring a comb and a net,” she says. “I’ll get one from my room. Wait here.”

She bustles off and I go to the window and look out. The cool air drifts in; the buzz of the court behind the closed door seems far away. Leeds Castle is surrounded by a moat of still water, and the swallows are flying low, dipping into their silvery reflections, round and round as I watch them, and the sky turns peach and golden. It is a wonderful sunset, almost scarlet along the horizon and then paler and paler pink till the underside of the clouds are gilded and the sky above them the palest blue. For a moment I feel aware of myself—I have a sense of myself as I do when I pray alone. A woman, still young, looking out of the window at the birds and the water, positioned in time and in a place, the stars of my destiny unseen in the sky above me, the will of God before me, knowing so little and longing so much, a sun setting as if to mark the ending of a day.

“Don’t say a word.”

I recognize Thomas’s quiet voice at once—who else do I hear in my dreams every night?—I turn, and he is standing before the closed door, looking a little more tired and a little thinner than when I last saw him in the stern of the king’s barge, going away from me without a gesture of farewell.

I am silent, waiting for him to speak.