“It was a wound from jousting, wasn’t it? Years ago?”

“Yes, yes, it was. An injury from sport. A young man’s wound. Reckless, I was reckless. Fearless.”

“And I don’t doubt that you’ll be riding again within a month—still reckless and fearless,” I say with a smile.

He draws me closer. “You know I have to be able to ride. I have to lead my men to France. I have to get well. I have to get up.”

“I am sure you will,” I say, the easy lie quickly in my mouth. I am not at all sure that he will. I can see the drain from the wound dripping the vile pus into a bowl on the floor, the stink of it worse than carrion. I can see a great glass jar with black hungry leeches crawling up the sides. I can see the table spread with flagons and bottles and pestles and mortars, and the apothecary desperately stirring drafts, and the worried faces of the two greatest doctors in England. I have nursed a dying husband before, and his bedroom looked like this, but God knows I have never smelled a stink like this before. It is a fog of rotting flesh, like a charnel house.

“Sit,” the king commands me. “Sit beside me.”

I swallow down disgust as a page brings a chair to me. The king is on his great strengthened seat, his wounded leg supported on a footstool, draped in sheets to try to contain the smell, to try to hide that the King of England is slowly rotting away.

“I am going to name my heirs,” he says quietly. “Before I go to France.”

Now I understand what the councillors were arguing about. It is essential that I betray neither hope nor fear for Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth. It is essential that I do not show my own interest. I don’t doubt that the courtiers who just left the room were advocating their own candidates—Edward Seymour reminding everyone of the primacy of his nephew the prince, Thomas Howard advocating for the inheritance of Lady Elizabeth, Bishop Gardiner and Thomas Wriothesley pushing for the elevation of Lady Mary to be heir after Edward.