“I have never cooked,” I say, a little on my dignity. “I have always had a cook, and kitchen maids too. But I know how to command a kitchen and a brew house and a dairy. I used to make my own physic from herbs, and perfumes and soaps.”

“You know how to run a household?”

“I commanded Snape Castle and all our lands in the North when my husband was away from home,” I tell him.

“Held it in a siege, didn’t you?” he asks. “Against those traitors. That must have been hard. You must have been brave.”

I nod modestly. “Yes, my lord. I did my duty.”

“Faced down the rebels, didn’t you? Didn’t they threaten to burn down your castle and you inside it?”

I remember the days and the nights very well when the desperately poor men in rags came against the castle and begged for a return to the good days, the old days when the churches were free with charity and the king was guided by the lords. They wanted the church restored and the monasteries back in their former glory. They demanded that my husband Lord Latimer speak for them to the king, they knew that he agreed with them. “I knew they would not prevail against you,” I say, faithless to them and their cause. “I knew that I had to hold on and that you would send my lord home to relieve us.”

I am making the best of a bad story, hoping that he doesn’t remember the truth of it. The king and his council rightly suspected my husband of siding with the rebels, and when the rebellion was brutally crushed, my husband had to side with reform: he betrayed his faith and his tenants for his own safety. How glad he would be now to see that it is all changed again. The churchmen have the upper hand and are busy restoring the abbeys. My husband would have delighted in his friend Stephen Gardiner’s new authority. He would have been all for the burning of reformers in the marshes of Windsor. He would have agreed that the ashes of heretics should blow away into the mud and that they should never rise from the dead.

“And how old were you when you first went from your mother?”

The king settles back against the pillow like a child wanting a story.

“You want to know about my girlhood?”

He nods. “Tell me all about it.”

“Well, I was a good age when I left home, more than sixteen. My mother had been trying to marry me off from the age of eleven. But it didn’t take.”

He nods. “Why ever not? Surely you were the prettiest little girl? With that hair and those eyes, you could have had your pick.”

I laugh. “I was pretty enough, but I had no more dowry than a tinker. My father left almost nothing—he died when I was only five. We all knew that Nan, my sister, and I would have to marry to oblige the family.”