“Not now!” I exclaim. “We were married only yesterday!”

She nods. “He’s greedy,” she says simply, as if it were a question of numbers of dishes at dinner. “He always wants more. He always needs more. He cannot get enough admiration.”

“But he married me!” I exclaim. “He insisted on marrying me.”

She shrugs. He married all my predecessors; it didn’t stop him wanting the next one.

* * *

At chapel, on the second story, in the queen’s box, looking down at the priest going about God’s work, creating the miracle of the Mass and turning his back on the congregation as if they are not fit even to see it, I pray for God’s help in this marriage. I think of the other queens who have knelt here, on this footstool embroidered with the royal coat of arms and the pied rose, and prayed here, too. Some of them will have prayed with increasing anguish for live Tudor sons, some of them will have mourned the loss of their previous lives, some will have been homesick for their childhood home and the family who loved them for themselves, not for what they could provide. One, at least, had a heartache like mine, had to wake each day and put away the thought of the man she loved. I can almost feel them around me as I rest my face in my hands. I can almost smell their fear in the wood of the book rest. I imagine that if I licked the polished grain I would taste the salt of their tears.

“Not merry?” The king meets me in the gallery outside the chapel. He with his friends behind him—Queen Jane’s brother, Queen Anne’s uncle, Queen Katherine’s cousin—I with my ladies behind me. “Not merry on your wedding morning?”

At once I beam. “Very merry,” I say determinedly. “And you, Your Majesty?”

“You can call me ‘my lord husband,’” he says, and takes my hand and crushes it between the curve of his thickly padded waistcoat and the embroidered sleeve. “Come with me to my privy chamber,” he says informally. “I need to talk with you on our own.”

He releases me so that he can lean on a page and slowly limp forward. I follow him through his great waiting chamber, where there are hundreds of men and women gathered to see us pass, through the presence chamber, where scores more are waiting with petitions and requests, and into his privy chamber, where only the court is admitted. At each doorway more people fall away, excluded from the room within, until it is just the king and Anthony Denny, a couple of clerks, his two pages, his Fool, Will Somers, two of my ladies, and me. This is what he means by being alone with his wife.