“I too am honored,” he says carefully. I imagine he has been coached in every possible response. This is a boy whose speech was scripted from the first words he ever learned. His first word was not “Mama”; they will have taught him to say something else. “It will be a comfort and joy to me to have a mother in you.”

“And I’ll learn Latin,” I say.

No one could have prepared him for this surprising promise and I see the leap of amusement of a normal boy. “You’ll find it awfully hard,” he warns me in English, and for a moment I see the child that he is, under the carapace of the prince that he has to be.

“I’ll get a tutor,” I say. “I love to learn and study. I have wanted all my life to have a good education. Now I can start, and then I can write to you in Latin and you can correct me.”

He gives a funny little formal bow. “I shall be honored,” he says, and looks up fearfully to see if his father approves.

But Henry, the king, somber in his own thoughts and besieged with pain, does not smile at his little son. “Very well,” is all he grudgingly says.

MANOR OF THE MORE, HERTFORDSHIRE,

SUMMER 1543

The plague is worsening in London, it is going to be one of the deadly years. Left behind us, hundreds are dying in the filthy streets as we ride farther and farther away from the city, making our way north, hunting and feasting. Guards are posted along the road from London to prevent anyone following the court, and the gates to every palace are bolted shut as soon as we are inside.

In a plague year at my home at Snape Castle I used to order the nursing of sick people in the village, send out tisanes and herbs to prevent the spread of the disease, and pay the burial parties for the pauper graves. I would have the newly orphaned children to eat in the castle kitchens, and ban travelers from visiting. It’s odd to me that now I am Queen of England and all the people are my people, I act as if I don’t care for any of them, and they can’t even beg for food at the kitchen doors.