We make love all night, as if we were newly married and newly discovering the beauty of each other’s body. He holds me as if he will never leave me, and in the morning he carries me over to the window, wrapped in a fur, and kisses my neck, my shoulders, and finally my smiling lips, as we watch the Venetian galleys slicing their oars through the harbor water as they come in, to take his troops to France.

“Not so soon, not today! I can’t bear to let you go,” I whisper.

“That you should love me like this now!” he exclaims. “I have been waiting for this ever since I first met you. I have dreamed that you might want me, I have come to your bed night after night longing for your smile, hoping that there would come a night when you would not turn away.”

“I’ll never turn away again,” I swear.

The joy in his face is unmistakable, he looks like a man in love for the first time.

“Come back safely to me, you must come back safe,” I whisper urgently.

“Promise me that you won’t change. Promise me that I will come back and find you like this? Loving like this?”

I laugh. “Shall we swear an oath? You shall swear to come home safe, and I will promise that you will find me loving?”

“Yes,” he says. “I so swear,” and he puts one hand on his heart and the other in mine, and though I am laughing at the two of us, flushed from bed, handclasped, swearing to be true to each other like new lovers, I hold his hand and I promise to welcome him home as warmly as now when I see him set out.

“Because you love me at last,” he says, wrapping me in his arms, his lips to my hair.

“Because I love you at last,” I confirm. “I did not think that I ever would, I did not think that I ever could. But I do.”

“And you are glad of it,” he presses.

I smile and let him draw me back to the bed though the bugles outside are calling. “And I am glad of it,” I say.

Henry appoints our son Arthur as Regent of England in his father’s absence: a solemn ceremony on the deck of his ship the Swan. Arthur is only six years old, but he will not hold my hand, he stands alone, as a prince must, while his father reads out the Latin proclamation of regency, and the lords all around him go down on one knee and swear that they will accept Arthur’s rule until Henry comes home safe again.

Arthur’s little face is grave, his hazel eyes serious. He is bareheaded, his brown hair with just a glint of copper lifting a little from his face in the breeze from the sea. He replies to his father in perfect Latin; he has learned the speech from his schoolmaster, and practiced it every day with me, and there are no mistakes. I can see that the lords are impressed with him, with his learning and with the set of his shoulders and the proud stance. He has been raised to be Prince of Wales and one day King of England, and he will be a good prince and a compelling king.