“I am innocent of sin,” I maintain stubbornly. “You don’t have to caution me. I am Caesar’s wife—no one can say anything against me.”

“I am glad of it,” replies Thomas Cranmer, who has seen two adulterous queens climb the steps to the scaffold and not defended them. “I am glad of it. I could not bear—”

“But how am I to think? How am I to write? How am I to speak to him of reform without offending him?” I ask bluntly.

“God will guide you,” the old churchman says. “You must have courage, you must use your God-given wits and your God-given voice, and you must not let the old papists of the court tame you. You must be free to speak. He will love that in you. Don’t waver. You are the God-given leader for reform at court. Take your courage—do your work.”

GREENWICH PALACE,

SPRING 1546

In February the king’s fever returns.

“No one can care for me like William Butts used to do,” he says miserably. “I shall die for lack of good doctoring.”

He demands that I come to his bedside but he is ashamed of the smell in the room that no oils and herbs can conceal, and he does not like me to see his linen shirt wet in the armpits and stained at the front with constant sweat. But worse than this, he is starting to think that this is not ill health, but old age. He is sinking into a dark fearfulness of death that nothing but the return of his health will lift.

“Doctor Wendy will do his best for you,” I say. “He is so faithful and careful. And I pray for you every morning and night.”

“And bad news from Boulogne,” he remembers miserably. “That young fool Henry Howard is squandering everything I have gained there. He’s boastful, Kateryn. He’s vain. I have recalled him and I will send out Edward Seymour to take his place. I can trust Edward to keep my castle safe.”

“He will keep it safe,” I say soothingly. “You need not fear.”

“But what if I don’t get better?” His eyes, tiny in his puffy face, squint at me as fearfully as a child. “There is Edward, of no age; there is Mary who would turn to Spain in a moment. If I were to die now, this month, the country would be at war again by Easter. I wouldn’t trust any one of them not to take arms, and they would say they were fighting for the pope or fighting for the Bible, and all they would do would be to plunge this country into an internal war, and the French would invade.”

I sit at his bedside and take his damp hand. “No, no,” I say. “For you will get better.”