“The greatest destiny a woman can have,” he agrees. “But why do you think you have not conceived, Kateryn?”

The question is so unexpected that I give a little start. His eyes are closed; perhaps he does not see it. I think at once, guiltily, of the purse of herbs and Nan’s terror that if I do not prevent it, he will give me some monstrous miscarriage. It is not possible that someone in my rooms has told him of the herbs. I am certain that no one would betray me. No one knows but Nan and me. Even the maid who brings the hot water knows nothing more than that she brings a jug of hot water for a morning tisane, now and then.

“I don’t know, husband,” I say humbly. “Sometimes it takes time, I suppose.”

He opens his eyes. Now he is completely wide awake, as if he was never drowsy. “It never took time for me before,” he says. “I have three children, as you see, from three different mothers. And there were others, of course. They all conceived at once, within the first months. I am potent, royally potent.”

“Indeed.” I can feel my anxiety rising. This sounds like a trap, but I cannot see how to avoid it. “I see it.”

“So it must be some fault in you,” he says pleasantly enough. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Lord Latimer was not capable, so I never expected a child from him, and when I married my first husband I was too young, and we were hardly ever together.” Pointless to say that you, my third husband, the king, are an old man, sick as a fat dog, rarely potent, probably sterile, and that the wives who you now remember as so readily fertile were the wives of your youth, the first three, and now they are all dead: one was beheaded by you, two died of your neglect. They miscarried time after time, except the third, the one who died in her first childbed.

“Do you think that God does not smile on our marriage? Since he gives you no child, you must think that.”

The king’s God sent him one dead baby after another in his first marriage until the king realized that God was not smiling. A tiny squirm of protest turns in my mind. It is such blasphemy to call in God when the truth is something that we simply don’t understand. I cannot have God in this conversation as a witness against me. God should not bear witness against yet another of Henry’s wives. I think God Himself would be unwilling to argue that Kateryn Parr should be put aside. I feel my temper silently rise.