“Don’t cry,” he says when I have climbed down and mopped myself with the hem on my fine linen shift. “How shall you walk out and face your mother and my court if you are crying?”

“You hurt me,” I say resentfully. I show him the red weal on my wrist, and I bend and pull down my crumpled shift and my creased new gown in the merry Tudor green.

“I am sorry for that,” he says indifferently. “I will try not to hurt you in the future. If you don’t pull away, then I won’t have to hold you so tightly.”

“In the future?”

“Your maid-in-waiting or your charming sister, or even your agreeable mother, will admit me to your rooms. I shall come to you. You won’t ever be in the king’s bed again, so don’t think of it. You can tell your sister, or whoever it is who sleeps with you, that she must bed elsewhere. I will come every night before midnight at a time of my choosing. Some nights I might be later. You’ll have to wait up. You can tell your mother that this is your wish and mine.”

“She’ll never believe me,” I say irritably, rubbing the tears from my face and nipping my lips to bring the color back to them. “She’ll never think I have summoned you for love.”

“She’ll understand that I want a fertile bride,” he says shrewdly. “She’ll understand that you are to be carrying my child on your wedding day, or there will be no wedding. I won’t be such a fool as to be forced to marry a barren bride. We have agreed on this.”

“We?” I repeat. “We don’t! I don’t agree to this! I never said I agreed to this! And my mother would never believe that I consented to be shamed by you, that we have decided this together. She’ll know at once that this is not my wish but yours, and that you forced me.”

He smiles for the first time. “Ah no, you misunderstand me. I didn’t say ‘we’ meaning you and I. I can’t imagine speaking of you and me as ‘we.’ No; I meant me and my mother.”

I stop fussing with my skirt and turn to face him, openmouthed. “Your mother agreed that you should rape me?”

He nods. “Why not?”

I stammer: “Because she said she would be my friend, because she said that she saw my destiny! Because she said that she would pray for me!”

He is quite untroubled by this, seeing no contradiction in her tenderness to me and her command that I should be raped. “Of course she thinks it is your destiny,” he says. “All this”—his gesture takes in my bruised wrist, my red eyes, my humiliation, the rawness in my groin, and the ache in my heart—“All this is God’s will, as my lady mother sees it.”

I am so horrified that I can do nothing but stare at him.