“I want Nobody now,” the king says coldly. “Because Nobody gives nothing away, Nobody loves no one. The world is filled with people seeking only their own ambitions and working for their own causes. Even Thomas More—” He breaks off with a little self-pitying sob. ‘He chose loyalty to the church over his love for me. He chose his faith over life itself. You see? No one is ever faithful till death. If anyone tells you anything different, they are playing you for a fool. I will never be a fool again. I know that every smiling friend is an enemy, every advisor is pursuing his own interest. Everyone wants my place, everyone wants my fortune, everyone wants my inheritance.”

I can’t argue against this intense bitterness. “But you love your children,” I say quietly.

He looks across at Princess Mary, who is quietly talking to Sir Anthony Denny in a corner. He looks for Princess Elizabeth and sees her peeping upwards into the smiling face of Thomas Seymour.

“Not particularly,” he says, and his voice is like cold glass. “Who loved me as a child? No one.”

* * *

The young man Henry Howard, dearest friend of Henry’s dead illegitimate son, sends an imploring letter to the king from his prison in the Tower, reminding him that he and Henry Fitzroy were like brothers, that they spent every day together, that they rode and swam and played and wrote poetry together, that they were all in all to each other. They swore loyalty to one another and he would never, ever conspire against his best friend’s father, who had been a father to him.

Henry tosses the letter to me. “But I have read his interrogation,” he says. “I have sifted the evidence against him. I have looked at his heraldry and I have heard what he said about me.”

If I let him recite his wrongs, he will get angrier and angrier. He will raise his finger and point it at me, he will speak to me as if I am the guilty young man. He draws an intense pleasure in enacting his rage. He prompts himself like an actor to play the part for the thrill that it gives him. He likes to feel his heart race with bad temper; he likes a fight, even if it is in an empty room with a white-faced woman trying to calm him.

“But you are not taken in by all this,” I say, trying to appeal to Henry’s scholarly, critical mind before he unleashes his temper. “You are sifting the evidence, studying it. You are not believing everything that they tell you?”

“It is you that should be afraid of what they tell me!” he says in sudden irritation. “For if this treasonous dog that you speak for so sweetly had got his way, it would have been you in the Tower, not him; and his sister would have your place. He is your enemy, Kateryn, far more than he is mine. He plotted to inherit my power but he would have killed you.”