One freezing look from Lady Margaret warns everyone that there are to be no bawdy jests. The page boy turns back the covers, the king’s men in waiting take off his thick bejeweled robe, Henry in his beautifully embroidered white linen nightshirt slips between the sheets beside me, and we both sit up and sip our wedding ale like obedient children at bedtime while the archbishop finishes his prayers and steps back.

Reluctantly, the wedding guests go out, my mother gives me a quick farewell smile and shepherds my sisters away. Lady Margaret is the last to leave and as she goes to the door I see her look back at her son, as if she has to stop herself from coming back in to embrace him once more.

I remember that he told me of all the years when he went to sleep without her kiss or her blessing, and that she loves now to see him to his bed. I see her hesitating at the threshold as if she cannot bear to leave him, and I give her a smile, and I stretch out my hand and rest it lightly on her son’s shoulder, a gentle proprietorial touch. “Good night, Lady Mother,” I say. “Good night from us both.” I let her see me take her son’s fine linen collar in my fingers, the collar she embroidered herself in white-on-white embroidery, and I hold it as if it were the leash of a hunting dog who is wholly mine.

For a moment she stands watching us, her mouth a little open, drawing a breath, and as she stays there, I lean my head towards Henry as if I am going to rest it on his shoulder. He is smiling proudly, his face flushed, thinking that she is enjoying the sight of her son, her adored only son, in his wedding bed, a beautiful bride, a true princess, beside him. Only I understand that the sight of me, with his shoulder under my cheek, smiling in his bed, is eating her up with jealousy as if a wolf had hold of her belly.

Her face is twisted as she closes the door on us, and as the lock clicks shut and we hear the guardsmen ground their pikes, we both breathe out, as if we have been waiting for this moment when we are finally alone. I raise my head and take my hand from his shoulder, but he catches it and presses my fingers to his collarbone. “Don’t stop,” he says.

Something in my face alerts him to the fact that it was not a caress but a false coin. “Oh, what were you doing? Some spiteful girlish trick?”

I take my hand back. “Nothing,” I say stubbornly.

He looms towards me and for a moment I am afraid that I have angered him, and he is going to insist on confirming the marriage by bedding me, inspired by anger, wanting to give me pain for pain. But then he remembers the child that I carry, and that he may not touch me while I am pregnant, and he gets up bristling with offense, and throws his beautiful wedding robe around his shoulders and stirs the fire, draws a writing table to the chair and lights the candle. I realize that the whole day has been spoiled for him by this moment. He can declare a day ruined by the mishap of a minute and he will remember the minute and forget the day. He is always so anxious that he seeks disappointment—it confirms his pessimism. Now he will remember everything, the cathedral, the ceremony, the feasting, the moments that he enjoyed, through a veil of resentment, for the rest of his life.