There is someone in the room. I see a silent figure, seated in the window seat, knees folded up to his chin, in sunshine now where he was hidden in shadow before. A spy, a silent spy, who has been frozen like a statue, watching me. It is Will Somers, the king’s Fool. He must have seen me creep in, he must have watched me listening at the door, and now he sees me hurrying back to my own rooms, a guilty wife tiptoeing through her husband’s bedroom.

He raises his dark eyes to me and sees the naked guilt on my face.

“Will...”

He makes an exaggerated comical start as if he has seen me for the first time, a great Fool’s leap of surprise that sends him bounding from his seat to tumble to the floor. If I were not so afraid, I would have laughed out loud.

“Will...” I whisper urgently. “Don’t fool now.”

“Is that you? I thought you were a ghost,” he exclaims quietly. “A ghost of a queen.”

“I was listening for plans. I am afraid for the Princess Mary,” I say quickly. “I fear that she will be married against her will...”

He shakes his head, choosing to ignore the lie. “I have seen too many queens,” he says. “And too many of them are ghosts now. I don’t want to see a queen in danger; I don’t want to see another ghost. Indeed, I swear that I won’t see one. Not even one.”

“You did not see me?” I ask, catching his meaning.

“I did not see you, nor Kitty Howard creeping down the stairs in her nightgown, nor Anne of Cleves, pretty as her portrait, crying at her bedroom door. I am a Fool, not a guard. I don’t have to see things, and I am forbidden to understand them. There’s no point in me reporting them. Who would listen to a Fool? And so God bless.”

“God bless you, Will,” I say fervently, and melt through the doorway into the king’s bedroom and through the private corridor to the safety of my own rooms.

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

SPRING 1545

The cold wet days of this early spring seem to last forever, as if there never will be warm days of summer. The light gets brighter in the mornings and the daffodils flower coldly on the banks of the river, but the gardens are wet, and the city outside the great walls of the palace is awash: the ill-drained streets flooded with cold, dirty water. When we ride, there is no pleasure in it, for the horses labor in the mud, and the frozen rain comes in scuds into our faces. We come home early, hunched in the saddle, chilled and bedraggled.