It is like living with a different man. The terrible anxiety of the early years has melted away from Henry, and whether he is in the schoolroom interrupting lessons to teach Arthur to play dice, tossing Harry up in the air, dancing little Margaret around till she screams with laughter, petting Elizabeth in her cradle, or wasting his time in my rooms, teasing my ladies and singing with the musicians, he does not stop smiling, calling for entertainment, laughing at some foolish joke.

When he greets me at chapel in the morning he kisses my hand and then draws me to him and kisses me on the mouth, and then walks beside me with his arm around my waist. When he comes to my room at night he no longer sits and broods at the fireside, trying to see his future in the fading embers, but enters laughing, carrying a bottle of wine, persuades me to drink with him, and then carries me to my bed, where he makes love to me as if he would devour me, kissing every inch of my skin, nibbling my ear, my shoulder, my belly, and only finally sliding deep into me and sighing with pleasure as if my bed is his favorite place in all the world, and my touch is his greatest pleasure.

He is free at last to be a young man, to be a happy man. The long years of hiding, of fear, of danger seem to slide away from him and he begins to think that he has come to his own, that he can enjoy his throne, his country, his wife, that these goods are his by right. He has won them, and nobody can take them from him.

The children learn to approach him, confident of their welcome. I start to joke with him, play games of cards and dice with him, win money from him and put my earrings down as a pledge when I up the stakes, making him laugh. His mother does not cease her constant attendance at chapel but she stops praying so fearfully for his safety and starts to thank God for many blessings. Even his uncle Jasper sits back in his great wooden chair, laughs at the Fool and stops raking the hall with his hard gaze, ceases staring into dark corners for a shadowy figure with a naked blade.

And then, just two nights before Christmas, the door to my bedchamber opens and it is as if we had fallen back to the early years of our marriage and all the happiness and easiness is gone in a moment. A frost has fallen; the habitual darkness comes in with him. He enters with a quick cross word to his servant, who was following with glasses and a bottle of wine. “I don’t want that!” he spits, as if it is madness even to suggest it, he has never wanted such a thing, he would never want such a thing; and the man flinches and goes out, closing the door, without another word.