I look at her grave face, and at once I fear that she somehow knows my secret. She knows I love Thomas and we are lost. I can do nothing but brazen it out. “Oh, what is it, Nan? You look very serious? I’m not a virgin bride, you need not warn me of what’s to come. I don’t expect to see anything new,” I laugh.

“It is serious. I have to ask you a question. Kat—do you think you are barren?”

“What a thing to ask me! I’m only thirty-one!”

“But you never got a child from Lord Latimer?”

“God didn’t bless us, and he was away from home, and in his later years he wasn’t...” I make a dismissive gesture. “Anyway. Why do you ask?”

“Just this,” she says grimly. “The king cannot bear to lose another baby. So you can’t conceive one. It’s not worth the risk.”

I am touched. “He would be so grieved?”

She tuts with impatience. Sometimes I irritate my London-bred sister with my ignorance. I am a country lady—worse even than that—a lady from the North of England, far from all the gossip, innocent as the northern skies, blunt as a farmer.

“No, of course not. It’s not grief, for him. He never feels grief.” She glances at the bolted door and draws me farther into the room so that no one, not even someone with their ear pressed to the wooden panels, could hear us.

“I don’t believe that he can give you a baby that can stay in the womb. I don’t think he can make a healthy child.”

I step closer so that we are mouth to ear. “This is treason, Nan. Even I know it. You’re mad to say such a thing to me, just before my wedding day.”

“I’d be mad if I didn’t. Kateryn, I swear to you that he can’t make anything but miscarriages and stillbirths.”

I lean back to see her grave face. “This is bad,” I say.

“I know.”

“You think I will miscarry?”

“Or worse.”

“What on earth could be worse?”

“If you were to birth a child, it might be a monster.”

“A what?”

She is as close as if we were confessing, her eyes on my face. “It’s the truth. We were told never to speak of it. It’s a deep secret. No one who was there has ever spoken of it.”

“You’d better speak now,” I say grimly.

“Queen Anne Boleyn—her death sentence was not the gossip and slander and lies they collected against her: all that nonsense about dozens of lovers. Anne Boleyn gave birth to her own fate. Her death sentence was the little monster.”

“She had a little monster?”

“She miscarried something malformed, and the midwives were hired spies.”

“Spies?”