We have to wait. We wait all the day, and we try to pray for Anne Askew. I dine with the king and my ladies dance for him, and we smile until our cheeks ache. I glance at him sideways as he is listening to the music and beating time with his hand, and I think: do you know that a woman who thinks as I do, who has preached before me, who loved me when she was a little girl and whose gifts I admire, is being questioned for the offense of heresy, which might take her to the stake? Do you know this and are you waiting to see what I will do? Is it a test, to see if I will act for her? Or do you know nothing? Is this nothing more than the clockwork movements of the old church, set in motion like automata, the ambition of the Bishop of London, the bigotry of Stephen Gardiner, the endless conspiracy of the old churchmen grinding on and on and resisting change? Should I tell you of this and ask for your help? Am I sitting beside the man who would save Anne, or beside the king who is playing her as a piece in one of his games?

Henry turns and smiles at me. “I shall come to your rooms tonight, sweetheart,” he says.

And I think: that proves it. He must know nothing. Not even a king as old and as duplicitous as this King of England could possibly smile and bed his wife while her friend was being interrogated on his orders.

* * *

I do not speak of Anne to my husband, though as he strives to reach his pleasure he groans: “You please me, ah, Kateryn, you do please me. You can have anything...”

When he is quiet and falling asleep he repeats: “You please me, Kateryn. You can have any favor.”

“I want nothing,” I say. I would feel like a whore if I named a favor now. Anne Askew prides herself on being a free woman; she defied her husband and her father. I should not buy her freedom with the sexual pleasure of a man old enough to be our father.

He understands this. He has a sly smile as he lies back on the heaped pillows, his eyes half closed, drowsy. “Ask me later then,” he says, “if you would detach payment from the deed.”

“The deed is a gift of love,” I say pompously, and then I feel that I have earned his scoffing laugh.

“You make it gracious by naming it so,” he says. “It is one of the things that I like about you, Kateryn: you do not see everything as a trade, you don’t see everyone else as a rival or an enemy.”

“No, I don’t,” I say. “But it must be a grim world if you see it like that. How would one bear to live in it?”