The door closes behind them and I am kneeling at the foot of the bed in silence.

“You can come closer,” he says gruffly. “I won’t bite. Get into bed.”

“I was saying my prayers,” I say. “Shall I pray aloud for you, Your Majesty?”

“You can call me Henry now,” he says. “When we’re alone.”

I take that as a refusal of the prayers, and I lift up the covers and slip into bed beside him. I don’t know what he is going to do. Since he cannot even roll on his side unaided, he certainly cannot mount me. I lie beside him perfectly still and wait for him to tell me what he wants.

“You’ll have to sit on my lap,” he says eventually, as if he has been puzzling at this too. “You’re not a foolish girl, you’re a woman. You’ve been wedded and bedded more than once. You know what to do, eh?”

This is worse than I had imagined. I lift the hem of my nightgown out of the way, and creep towards him on my hands and knees. Unbidden, the vision of Thomas Seymour, outstretched and naked, his back arched, his dark eyelashes sweeping his brown cheeks, comes into my mind. I can see the muscles of his hard belly ripple with pleasure at my touch as he thrusts upwards.

“Latimer was no great lover, I take it?” the king inquires.

“He was not a man of great strength like you, Your... Henry,” I say. “And of course, he was unwell.”

“So how did he do?”

“His health?”

“How did he do the act? How did he bed you?”

“Very rarely.”

He grunts in approval at that, and I see that he is aroused. The thought that he is more potent than my former husband excites him.

“That must have made him angry,” he says with pleasure. “Taking a woman like you to wife and not being able to do the act.” He laughs. “Come on,” he says. “You’re very lovely. I can’t wait.”

He takes hold of my right wrist and tugs me towards him. Obediently I kneel up and try to straddle his body. But his fleshy hips are so wide that I cannot get across, and he pulls me down so that I squat on him as if I were astride a fat horse. I have to hold my face rigid so that I don’t grimace. I must not tremble, I must not cry.

“There,” he says, excited at his own potency. “Feel that? Not bad for a man just over fifty, is it? You won’t have got that from old Latimer.”

I murmur a wordless response. He pulls me towards him and struggles to push upwards against me. He is soft, a half-formed thing, and now I am disgusted as well as embarrassed.

“There!” he says again more loudly. His face is becoming redder, the sweat is pouring off him with the effort of pulling me down with his hands and squirming his huge haunches upwards.