“What do you want?” Henry snaps at me.

I raise my eyebrows at his rudeness in front of his mother, but I curtsey to her, saying very low: “I come to bid you good night, Lady Mother.”

“Good night,” she says. She barely looks up, she is as distracted as her son.

“A woman stopped me on the way to chapel today, and she asked me if her debt to the king could be excused, or if she could be given longer to pay,” I say. “It seems that her husband was charged with a minor offense but he was given no choice of punishment. He has to pay a fine, a very heavy fine. She says they will lose their house and their land and be ruined. She says that he would have preferred to serve time in prison than see everything he has worked for broken up. His name is George Whitehouse.”

They both look at me as if I am speaking Greek. Both of them are utterly uncomprehending. “He is a loyal subject,” I say. “He just got into a brawl. It is hard that he should lose his family home for an alehouse brawl, because the fine is greater than he can pay. The fines were never so heavy before.”

“Do you understand nothing?” My Lady demands, and her tone is quietly furious. “Do you not see that we have to get every penny, every groat that we can, from everyone in the kingdom, so that we can raise armies and pay for them? Do you think we would excuse some alehouse drunkard his fine when it will buy us a soldier? Even if it buys us an arrow?”

Henry is poring over his list, not even looking up, but I am certain that he is listening. “But this man is a loyal subject,” I protest. “If he loses his house and his family, if he is ruined because the king’s men sell it over his head to collect an impossible fine, then we lose his love and his loyalty. Then we have lost a soldier. The safety of the throne is built on those that love us—only on those that love us. We rule by the consent of the governed—we have to make sure that those who are loyal to us continue as loyal. That list . . .” I point to the names of those whose loyalty is in doubt. “That list will grow if you fine good men into bankruptcy.”

“It’s all very well for you to say such a thing—you who are loved, who have always been loved!” My Lady the King’s Mother suddenly bursts out. “You who come from a family who prided themselves on being so unendingly, so showily . . .” I am horrified, waiting for what she is going to say “. . . so unceasingly endearing!” she spits as if it were the gravest fault. “Endearing! D’you know what they say about the boy?”

I shake my head.