Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd The News Building 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

This edition published by Harper 2017

Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 2006

Cover design and illustration: Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover image © Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK / The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images (portrait of Anne of Cleves, 1539, Holbein the Younger, Hans 1497/8-1543).

Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007190331

Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780007373932

Version: 2017-01-23

Dedication

For Anthony

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Jane Boleyn, Blickling Hall, Norfolk, July 1539

Anne, Duchess of Cleves, Duren, Cleves, July 1539

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth, July 1539

Jane Boleyn, Blickling Hall, Norfolk November 1539

Anne, Cleves Town, November 1539

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth November 1539

Jane Boleyn, Greenwich Palace, December 1539

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth, December 1539

Anne, Calais, December 1539

Jane Boleyn, Calais, December 1539

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth, December 1539

Anne, Calais, December 1539

Jane Boleyn, Rochester, December 1539

Katherine, Rochester, 31 December 1539

Jane Boleyn, Rochester, 31 December 1539

Katherine, Rochester, 31 December 1539

Jane Boleyn, Rochester, 31 December 1539

Anne, on the road to Dartford, 1 January, 1540

Katherine, Dartford, 2 January 1540

Anne, Blackheath, 3 January 1540

Katherine, Greenwich Palace, 3 January 1540

Jane Boleyn, Greenwich Palace, 3 January 1540

Anne, Greenwich Palace, 3 January 1540

Katherine, Greenwich Palace, 6 January 1540

Anne, Greenwich Palace, 6 January 1540

Jane Boleyn, Greenwich Palace, 6 January 1540

Anne, Greenwich Palace, 6 January 1540

Katherine, Greenwich Palace, 7 January 1540

Jane Boleyn, Whitehall Palace, January 1540

Anne, Whitehall Palace, January 1540

Katherine, Whitehall Palace, January 1540

Anne, Whitehall Palace, 11 January 1540

Jane Boleyn, Whitehall Palace, February 1540

Katherine, Whitehall Palace, February 1540

Anne, Hampton Court, March 1540

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, March 1540

Katherine, Hampton Court, March 1540

Anne, Hampton Court, March 1540

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, March 1540

Katherine, Hampton Court, March 1540

Anne, Hampton Court, March 1540

Katherine, Hampton Court, March 1540

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, March 1540

Katherine, Westminster Palace, April 1540

Anne, Westminster Palace, April 1540

Jane Boleyn, Westminster Palace, May 1540

Anne, Westminster Palace, June 1540

Jane Boleyn, Westminster Palace, June 1540

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth, June 1540

Anne, Westminster Palace, 10 June 1540

Jane Boleyn, Westminster Palace, 24 June, 1540

Anne, Richmond Palace, July 1540

Jane Boleyn, Westminster Palace, 7 July 1540

Anne, Richmond Palace, 8 July 1540

Jane Boleyn, Richmond Palace, 8 July 1540

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth, 9 July 1540

Anne, Richmond Palace, 12 July 1540

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth, 12 July 1540

Anne, Richmond Palace, 13 July 1540

Queen Katherine, Oatlands Palace, 28 July 1540

Jane Boleyn, Oatlands Palace, 30 July 1540

Anne, Richmond Palace, 6 August 1540

Katherine, Hampton Court, August 1540

Jane Boleyn, Windsor Palace, October 1540

Katherine, Hampton Court, October 1540

Anne, Richmond Palace, October 1540

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, October 1540

Katherine, Hampton Court, October 1540

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, October 1540

Anne, Richmond Palace November 1540

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, Christmas 1540

Katherine, Hampton Court, Christmas 1540

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, Christmas 1540

Anne, Hampton Court, Christmas 1540

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, January 1541

Anne, Richmond Palace, February 1541

Katherine, Hampton Court, March 1541

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, March 1541

Katherine, Hampton Court, March 1541

Anne, Richmond Palace, March 1541

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, April 1541

Katherine, Hampton Court, April 1541

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, April 1541

Anne, Richmond Palace, April 1541

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, April 1541

Katherine, Hampton Court, April 1541

Anne, Richmond Palace, May 1541

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, June 1541

Anne, Richmond Palace, June 1541

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court, July 1541

Katherine, Lincoln Castle, August 1541

Jane Boleyn, Pontefract Castle, August 1541

Anne, Richmond Palace, September 1541

Katherine, King’s Manor, York, September 1541

Jane Boleyn, Ampthill, October 1541

Anne, Richmond Palace November 1541

Katherine, Hampton Court November 1541

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court November 1541

Anne, Richmond Palace November 1541

Katherine, Syon Abbey November 1541

Jane Boleyn, the Tower of London November 1541

Anne, Richmond Palace, December 1541

Katherine, Syon Abbey, Christmas 1541

Jane Boleyn, the Tower of London, January 1542

Anne, Richmond Palace, February 1542

Jane Boleyn, the Tower of London, February 1542

Katherine, Syon Abbey, February 1542

Jane Boleyn, the Tower of London, 13 February 1542

Anne, Hever Castle, January 1547

Author’s Note

Discover More of Philippa Gregory’s Tudor Novels

Gardens for The Gambia

About the Author

Also by Philippa Gregory

About the Publisher

Jane Boleyn, Blickling Hall, Norfolk, July 1539

It is hot today, the wind blows over the flat fields and marshes with the stink of the plague. In weather like this, if my husband were still with me, we would not be trapped in one place, watching a leaden dawn and a sunset of dull red; we would be travelling with the king’s court, on progress through the weald and downland of Hampshire and Sussex, the richest and most beautiful countryside in all of England, riding high on the hilly roads and looking out for the first sight of the sea. We would be out hunting every morning, dining under the thick canopy of the trees at midday and dancing in the great hall of some country house at night in the yellow light of flickering torches. We were friends with the greatest families in the land, we were the favourites of the king, kin to the queen. We were beloved; we were the Boleyns, the most beautiful, sophisticated family at the court. Nobody knew George without desiring him, nobody could resist Anne, everyone courted me as a passport to their attention. George was dazzling, dark-haired, dark-eyed and handsome, always mounted on the finest horses, always at the side of the queen. Anne was at the peak of her beauty and her wits, as alluring as dark honey. And I went everywhere with them.

The two of them used to ride together, racing, neck and neck like lovers, and I could hear their laughter over the thudding of the hooves as they went flying by. Sometimes, when I saw them together, so rich, so young, so beautiful, I couldn’t tell which of them I loved more.

All the court was besotted with the two of them, those dark Boleyn flirtatious looks, their high living: such gamblers, such lovers of risk; both so fervent for their reform of the church, so quick and clever in argument, so daring in their reading and thoughts. From the king to the kitchenmaid there was not one person who was not dazzled by the pair of them. Even now, three years on, I cannot believe that we will never see them again. Surely, a couple so young, so radiant with life, cannot simply die? In my mind, in my heart, they are still riding out together, still young, still beautiful. And why would I not passionately long for this to be true? It has only been three years since I last saw them; three years, two months and nine days since his careless fingers brushed against mine, and he smiled and said ‘Good day, wife, I must go, I have everything to do today,’ and it was a May Day morning and we were preparing for the tournament. I knew he and his sister were in trouble, but I did not know how much.

Every day in this new life of mine I walk to the crossroads in the village, where there is a dirty milestone to the London road. Picked out in mud and lichen, the carving says ‘London, 120 miles’. It is such a long way, such a long way away. Every day I bend down and touch it, like a talisman, and then I turn back again to my father’s house, which is now so small to me, who has lived in the king’s greatest palaces. I live on my brother’s charity, on the goodwill of his wife who cares nothing for me, on a pension from Thomas Cromwell the upstart moneylender, who is the king’s new great friend. I am a poor neighbour living in the shadow of the great house that was once my own, a Boleyn house, one of our many houses. I live quietly, cheaply, like a widow with no house of my own that no man wants.

And this is because I am a widow with no house of my own that no man wants. A woman of nearly thirty years old, with a face scored by disappointment, mother to an absent son, a widow without prospect of re-marriage, the sole survivor of an unlucky family, heiress to scandal.

My dream is that one day this luck will change. I will see a messenger in Howard livery riding down this very road, bringing a letter for me, a letter from the Duke of Norfolk, to summon me back to court, to tell me that there is work for me to do again: a queen to serve, secrets to whisper, plots to hatch, the unending double-dealing life of a courtier, at which he is so expert, and I am his greatest pupil. My dream is that the world will change again, swing topsy-turvy until we are uppermost once more, and I am restored. I saved the duke once, when we were in the worst danger, and in return he saved me. Our great sorrow was that we could not save the two of them, the two who now ride and laugh and dance only in my dreams. I touch the milestone once more, and imagine that tomorrow the messenger will come. He will hold out a paper, sealed with the Howard crest deep and shiny in the red wax. ‘A message for Jane Boleyn, the Viscountess Rochford?’ he will ask, looking at my plain kirtle and the dust on the hem of my gown, my hand stained with dirt from the London milestone.

‘I will take it,’ I shall say. ‘I am her. I have been waiting for ever.’ And I shall take it in my dirty hand: my inheritance.

Anne, Duchess of Cleves, Duren, Cleves, July 1539

I hardly dare to breathe. I am as still as a block, a smile stuck on my face, my eyes wide open, looking boldly at the artist, appearing, I hope, trustworthy, my frank stare indicating honesty but not immodesty. My borrowed jewels are the best that my mother could lay her hands on, designed to show to a critical viewer that we are not quite paupers, even though my brother will offer no dowry to pay a husband. The king will have to choose me for my pleasant appearance and political connections. I have nothing else to offer. But he must choose me. I am absolutely determined that he will choose me. It is everything to me to get away from here.

On the other side of the room, carefully not observing my portrait forming under the painter’s quick, sweeping strokes of the crayon, is my sister, awaiting her turn. God forgive me, but I pray that the king does not choose her. She is eager as me for the chance to leave Cleves, and to leap to such greatness as the throne of England; but she does not need it as I do. No girl in the world can need it as I do.

Not that I will speak so much as one word against my brother, nothing now, and nothing in the years to come. I will never say anything against him. He is a model son to my mother, and a worthy successor to the dukedom of Cleves. During the last months of my poor father’s life, when he was clearly as mad as any fool, it was my brother who wrestled him into his chamber, locked the door from the outside and publicly gave out that he had a fever. It was my brother who forbade my mother to summon physicians or even preachers to expel the devils that occupied my poor father’s wandering brains. It was my brother, cunning – like an ox is cunning, in a slow mean way – who said that we must claim my father was a drunkard rather than allow the taint of madness to diminish our family reputation. We will not make our way in the world if there is suspicion against our blood. But if we slander our own father, call him a sot, having denied him the help that he so desperately needed, then we may yet rise. This way I will make a good marriage. This way my sister will make a good marriage. This way my brother can make a good marriage and the future of our house is assured, even though my father fought his demons alone, and without help.

Hearing my father whimper at the door of his chamber that he was a good boy now, and would we let him out? Hearing my brother answer so steadily and so firmly that he could not come out, I wondered then if actually we had it all wrong, and my brother was already as mad as my father, my mother too, and the only sane one in this household was me, since I alone was dumb with horror at what we were doing. But I didn’t tell anyone that thought, either.

Since my earliest childhood I have served under my brother’s discipline. He was always to be duke of these lands sheltered between the rivers of the Meuse and the Rhine. A small enough patrimony; but one so well-placed that every power of Europe seeks our friendship: France, the Hapsburg Spanish and Austrians, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope himself, and now Henry of England. Cleves is the keyhole to the heart of Europe, and the Duke of Cleves is the key. No wonder that my brother values himself so highly, he is right to value himself so highly; it is only I who sometimes wonder if he is not, in truth, a petty princeling seated below the salt at the grand banquet which is Christendom. But I tell no-one I think this, not even my sister Amelia. I do not trust anyone very readily.

He commands my mother by right of the greatness of his position in the world and she is his Lord Chamberlain, his Major Domo, his Pope. With her blessing, my brother commands my sister and myself because he is the son and the heir and we are burdens. He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best; or spinster-parasites at the worst. My older sister Sybilla has already escaped; she left home as soon as she could, as soon as her marriage could be arranged, she is now free of the tyranny of fraternal attention. I have to go next. It has to be me next. I must be freed. They cannot be so pointlessly cruel to me to send Amelia in my place. Her chance will come, her time will come. But I am the next sister in line, it has to be me. I cannot imagine why they even offered Amelia, unless it was to frighten me into greater subservience. If so, it has worked. I am terrified that I will be overlooked for a younger girl, and my brother has let this come about. In truth, he ignores his own best interests to torment me.

My brother is a petty duke, in every sense of the word. When my father died, still whispering for someone to open the door, my brother stepped into his shoes but can never fill them. My father was a man in the wider world, he attended the courts of France and Spain, he travelled in Europe. My brother, staying at home as he has done, thinks that the world can show him nothing greater than his own duchy. He thinks there is no greater book than the Bible, no better church than one with bare walls, no better guide than his own conscience. With only a small household to rule, his command falls very heavily on very few servants. With only a small inheritance, he is alert to the needs of his own dignity, and I, who lack dignity, feel the full weight of his. When he is drunk or happy he calls me the most rebellious of his subjects and pets me with a heavy hand. When he is sober or irritated he says that I am a girl who does not know her place and threatens to lock me in my room.

This is no empty threat in Cleves today. This is a man who locked up his own father. I think he is quite capable of imprisoning me. And if I cried at the door, would anyone let me out?

Master Holbein indicates to me with one curt nod of his head that I can leave my seat and my sister can take my place. I am not allowed to look at my portrait. None of us may see what he sends to the king in England. He is not here to flatter us, nor paint us as beauties. He is here to sketch as accurate a representation as his genius can produce, so that the King of England can see which of us he would like, as if we were Flanders mares coming to the English stallion at stud.

Master Holbein, who leans back as my sister bustles forwards, takes a fresh sheet of paper, examines the point of his pastel crayon. Master Holbein has seen us all, all of the candidates for the post of Queen of England. He has painted Christina of Milan and Louise of Guise, Marie of Vendôme and Anne of Guise. So I am not the first young woman whose nose he has measured with his crayon held at arm’s length and one eye squinting. For all I know, there will be another girl after my sister Amelia. He may stop off in France on his way home to England to scowl at another simpering girl and capture her likeness and delineate her faults. There is no point in my feeling demeaned, like a piece of fustian laid out for the pattern, by this process.

‘Do you not like being painted? Are you shy?’ he asked me gruffly as my smile faded when he looked at me like a piece of meat on the cook’s draining slab.

I did not tell him what I felt. There is no sense in offering information to a spy. ‘I want to marry him,’ was all I said. He raised an eyebrow.

‘I just paint the pictures,’ he remarked. ‘You had better tell your desire to his envoys, Ambassadors Nicholas Wotton and Richard Beard. No point telling me.’

I sit in the window-seat, hot in my best clothes, constricted by a stomacher pulled so tight that it took two maids hauling on the laces to get it knotted, and I will have to be cut free when the picture is finished. I watch Amelia put her head on one side and preen and smile flirtatiously at Master Holbein. I hope to God that he does not like her. I hope to God that he does not paint her as she is, plumper, prettier than me. It does not really matter to her whether or not she goes to England. Oh! It would be a triumph for her, a leap from being the youngest daughter of a poor duchy to Queen of England, a flight that would lift her and our family and the whole nation of Cleves. But she does not need to get away as I need to get away. It is not a matter of need for her, as it is for me. I might almost say: desperation.

I have agreed not to look at Master Holbein’s painting and so I do not look. One thing is true of me: if I give my word on something I keep it, although I am only a girl. Instead, I look out of the window, into the courtyard of our castle. The hunting horns sound in the forest outside, the great barred gate swings open, the huntsmen come in, my brother at their head. He glances up to the window and sees me before I can duck back. At once I know that I have irritated him. He will feel that I should not be at the window, where I can be seen by anyone in the castle yard. Although I moved too fast for him to see me in any detail, I feel certain that he knows that I am tightly laced and that the square neckline of my gown is low cut, though a muslin neckpiece covers me to my very chin. I flinch from the scowl that he shoots up to the window. Now he is displeased with me, but he will not say so. He will not complain of the gown that I could explain, he will complain of something else, but I cannot yet know what it will be. All I can be sure of is that sometime today or tomorrow, my mother will call me to her room, and he will be standing behind her chair, or turned away, or just entering the door, as if it were nothing to do with him at all, as if he were quite indifferent, and she will say to me, in tones of deep disapproval: ‘Anne, I hear that you have …’ and it will be something which happened days ago, which I have quite forgotten, but which he will have known and saved up until now, so that I am in the wrong, and perhaps even punished, and he will not say a word about seeing me, sitting in the window, looking pretty, which is my real offence against him.

When I was a little girl, my father used to call me his falke, his white falcon, his gyrfalcon, a hunting bird of the cold northern snows. When he saw me at my books or at my sewing he would laugh and say, ‘Oh, my little falcon, mewed up? Come away and I shall set you free!’ and not even my mother could stop me running from the school room to be with him.

I wish now, I so wish now, that he could call me away again.

I know that my mother thinks that I am a foolish girl, and my brother thinks worse; but if I were Queen of England the king could trust me with my position, I would not break into French fashions or Italian dances. They could trust me, the king could trust his honour to me. I know how important is a man’s honour, and I have no desire to be anything but a good girl, a good queen. But I also believe that however strict the King of England, I would be allowed to sit in the window of my own castle. Whatever they say of Henry of England, I think he would tell me honestly if I offended him, and not order my mother to beat me for something else.

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth, July 1539

Now let me see, what do I have?

I have a small gold chain from my long-dead mother that I keep in my special jewellery box, sadly empty but for this one chain; but I am certain to get more. I have three gowns, one of them new. I have a piece of French lace sent by my father from Calais. I have half a dozen ribbons of my own. And, more than anything else, I have me. I have me, glorious me! I am fourteen today, imagine that! Fourteen! Fourteen, young, nobly born though, tragically, not rich; but in love, wonderfully in love. My lady grandmother the duchess will give me a gift for my birthday, I know she will. I am her favourite and she likes me to look well. Perhaps some silk for a gown, perhaps a coin to buy lace. My friends in the maids’ chamber will give me a feast tonight when we are supposed to be asleep; the young men will tap their secret signal on the door, and we will rush to let them in and I will cry, ‘oh, no!’ as if I wanted it to be just girls alone, as if I am not in love, madly in love, with Francis Dereham. As if I haven’t spent all day just longing for tonight, when I shall see him. In five hours from now I will see him. No! I have just looked at my grandmother’s precious French clock. Four hours and forty-eight minutes.

Forty-seven minutes.

Forty-six. I really am amazed at how devoted I am to him, that I should actually watch a clock tick down the time until we are together. This must be a most passionate love, a most devoted love, and I must be a girl of really unusual sensitivity to feel this deeply.

Forty-five; but it’s dreadfully boring, just waiting, now.

I haven’t told him how I feel, of course. I should die of embarrassment if I had to tell him myself. I think I may die anyway, die for love of him. I have told no-one but my dearest friend Agnes Restwold, and sworn her to secrecy on pain of death, on pain of a traitor’s death. She says she will be hanged and drawn and quartered before she tells anyone that I am in love. She says she will go to the block like my cousin Queen Anne before she betrays my secret. She says they will have to pull her apart on the rack before she tells. I have told Margaret Morton as well and she says that death itself would not make her tell, not if they were to fling her in the bear pit. She says they could burn her at the stake before she would tell. This is good because it means that one of them is certain to tell him before he comes to the chamber tonight, and so he will know that I like him.

I have known him for months now, half a lifetime. At first I only watched him but now he smiles and says hello to me. Once he called me by name. He comes with all the other young men of the household to visit us girls in our chamber, and he thinks he is in love with Joan Bulmer, who has eyes like a frog and if she were not so free with her favours, no man would ever look twice at her. But she is free, very free indeed; and so it is me that he does not look twice at. It isn’t fair. It’s so unfair. She is a good ten years older than me and married and so she knows how to attract a man, whereas I have much still to learn. Dereham is more than twenty as well. They all think of me as a child; but I am not a child, and I will show them. I am fourteen, I am ready for love. I am ready for a lover, and I am so in love with Francis Dereham that I will die if I don’t see him at once. Four hours and forty minutes.

But now, from today, everything must be different. Now that I am fourteen, everything is certain to change. It has to, I know it will. I shall put on my new French hood and I shall tell Francis Dereham that I am fourteen and he will see me as I truly am: a woman now, a woman of some experience, a woman grown; and then we shall see how long he stays with old froggy face when he could come across the room to lie in my bed instead.

He’s not my first love, it is true; but I never felt anything like this for Henry Manox and if he says I did, then he is a liar. Henry Manox was well-enough for me when I was a girl just living in the country, a child really, learning to play the virginal and knowing nothing of kissing and touching. Why, when he first kissed me I didn’t even like it very much, and begged him to stop, and when he put his hand up my skirt I was so shocked I screamed aloud and cried. I was only eleven years old, I couldn’t be expected to know the pleasures of a woman. But I know all about that now. Three years in the maids’ chamber has taught me every little wile and play that I need. I know what a man wants, and I know how to play him, and I know when to stop too.

My reputation is my dowry – my grandmother would point out that I have no other, sour old cat – and no-one will ever say that Katherine Howard does not know what is due to her and her family. I am a woman now, not a child. Henry Manox wanted to be my lover when I was a child in the country, when I knew next to nothing, when I had seen nobody, or at any rate nobody that mattered. I would have let him have me too, after he had bribed and bullied me for weeks to do the full deed, but in the end it was he that stopped short for fear of being caught. People would have thought badly of us since he was more than twenty and I was eleven. We were going to wait till I was thirteen. But now I live in Norfolk House in Lambeth, not buried in Sussex, and the king himself could ride past the door any day, the archbishop is our next-door neighbour, my own uncle Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, calls with all his great train, and he once remembered my name. I’m far beyond Henry Manox now. I’m not a country girl who can be bullied into giving him kisses and forced to do more, I am a good deal too high for that now. I know what’s what in the bedroom, I am a Howard girl, I have a wonderful future before me.

Except – and this is such a tragedy that I really don’t know how to bear it – although I am of an age to go to court, and as a Howard girl my natural place should be in the queen’s chambers, there is no queen! It is a disaster for me. There is no queen at all, Queen Jane died after having her baby, which seems to me to be just laziness really, and so there are no places at court for maids in waiting. This is so terribly unlucky for me, I think no girl has ever been as unlucky as I have been: to have my fourteenth birthday in London, just as the queen has to go and die, and the whole court droop into mourning for years. Sometimes I feel that the whole world conspires against me, as if people want me to live and die an old lady spinster.

What is the point of being pretty if no nobleman is ever going to know me? How will anyone ever see how charming I can be if nobody ever sees me at all? If it were not for my love, my sweetest handsome love, Francis, Francis, Francis, I should utterly despair, and throw myself into the Thames before I am a day older.

But thank God, at least I do have Francis to hope for, and the world to play for. And God, if He truly does know everything, can only have made me so exquisite for a great future. He must have a plan for me? Fourteen and perfect? Surely He in His wisdom won’t let me waste away in Lambeth?

Jane Boleyn, Blickling Hall, Norfolk November 1539

It comes at last, as the days grow dark and I am starting to dread another winter in the country: the letter I have wanted. I feel as if I have waited for it for a lifetime. My life can begin again. I can return to the light of good candles, to the heat of sea-coal braziers, to a circle of friends and rivals, to music and good food and dancing. I am summoned to court, thank God, I am summoned back to court and I shall serve the new queen. The duke, my patron and my mentor, has found me a place in the queen’s chamber once again. I shall serve the new Queen of England. I shall serve Queen Anne of England.

The name rings like a warning tocsin: Queen Anne, Queen Anne again. Surely, the councillors who advised the marriage must have had a moment when they heard the words Queen Anne and felt a shiver of horror? They must have remembered how unlucky the first Anne was for us all? The disgrace she brought to the king, and the ruin of her family, and my own loss? My unbearable loss? But no, I see a dead queen is quickly forgotten. By the time this new Queen Anne arrives, the other Queen Anne, my Queen Anne, my sister, my adored friend, my tormentor, will be nothing more than a rare memory – my memory. Sometimes I feel as if I am the only one in the whole country who remembers. Sometimes I feel as if I am the only one in the world who watches and wonders, the only one cursed with memory.

I still dream of her often. I dream that she is again young and laughing, careless of anything but her own enjoyment, wearing her hood pushed back from her face to show her dark hair, her sleeves fashionably long, her accent always so exaggeratedly French. The pearl ‘B’ at her throat proclaiming that the Queen of England is a Boleyn, as I am. I dream that we are in a sunlit garden, and George is happy, and I have my hand in his arm, and Anne is smiling at us both. I dream that we are all going to be richer than anyone could ever imagine, we will have houses and castles and lands. Abbeys will fall down to make stone for our houses, crucifixes will be melted for our jewellery. We will take fish from the abbey ponds, our hounds will range all over the church lands. Abbots and priors will give up their houses for us, the very shrines will lose their sanctity and honour us instead. The country will be made over to our glory, our enrichment and amusement. I always wake then, I wake and lie awake shaking. It is such a glorious dream; but I wake quite frozen with terror.

Enough now of dreaming! Once again I shall be at court. Once again I shall be the closest friend of the queen, a constant companion in her chamber. I shall see everything, know everything. I shall be at the very centre of life again, I shall be the new Queen Anne’s lady in waiting, serving her as loyally and well as I have served the other three of King Henry’s queens. If he can rise up and marry again without fear of ghosts, then so can I.

And I shall serve my kinsman, my uncle by marriage, the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, the greatest man in England after the king himself. A soldier, known for the speed of his marches and the abrupt cruelty of his attacks. A courtier, who never bends with any wind but always constantly serves his king, his own family, and his own interest. A nobleman with so much royal blood in his family that his claim to the throne is as good as any Tudor. He is my kinsman and my patron and my lord. He saved me from a traitor’s death once, he told me what I should do and how to do it. He took me when I faltered and led me from the shadow of the Tower and into safety. Ever since then I am sworn to him for life. He knows I am his. Once again, he has work for me to do, and I shall honour my debt to him.

Anne, Cleves Town, November 1539

I have it! I am to be it! I shall be Queen of England. I have slipped my jesses like a free falcon and I shall fly away. Amelia has her handkerchief to her eyes because she has a cold and is trying to look as if she has been crying at the news of my going. She is a liar. She will not be at all sad to see me leave. Her life as the only duchess left in Cleves will be better by far than being the younger sister to me. And when I am married – and what a marriage! – her chances of a good alliance are much improved. My mother does not look happy either, but her anxiety is real. She has been strained for months. I wish I could think it is for the loss of me but it is not. She is worried sick about the cost of this journey and my wedding clothes on my brother’s treasury. She is Lord of the Exchequer as well as housewife to my brother. Even with England waiving the demand for a dowry, this marriage is costing the country more than my mother wants to pay.

‘Even if the trumpeters come free, they will have to be fed,’ she says irritably, as if trumpeters are an exotic and expensive pet that I, in my vanity, have insisted on, instead of a loan from my sister Sybilla who wrote to me frankly that it does her no good in Saxony if I set off to one of the greatest kings in Europe in little more than a wagon with a couple of guards.

My brother says very little. This is a great triumph for him and a great step up in the world for his duchy. He is in a league with the other Protestant princes and dukes of Germany and they hope that this marriage will prompt England to join their alliance. If all the Protestant powers in Europe were united then they could attack France or the Hapsburg lands and spread the word of reform. They might get as far as Rome itself, they might curb the power of the Pope in his own city. Who knows what glory to God might come, if only I can be a good wife to a husband who has never been pleased before?

‘You must do your duty to God as you serve your husband,’ my brother says to me pompously.

I wait to see what exactly he means by this. ‘He takes his religion from his wives,’ he says. ‘When he was married to a princess from Spain he was named Defender of the Faith by the Pope himself. When he married the Lady Anne Boleyn she led him away from superstition to the light of reform. With Queen Jane he became Catholic again and if she had not died he would have reconciled with the Pope, for sure. Now, although he is no friend of the Pope, his country is all but Catholic. He could become a Roman Catholic again in a moment. But if you guide him as you should do, he will declare himself as a Protestant king and leader, and he will join with us.’

‘I will try my best,’ I say uncertainly. ‘But I am only twenty-four. He is a man of forty-eight and he has been king since he was a young man. He may not listen to me.’

‘I know you will do your duty,’ my brother tries to reassure himself; but as the time comes for me to leave, he grows more and more doubtful.

‘You cannot fear for her safety?’ I hear my mother mutter to him as he sits in the evening over his wine and stares at the fire as if he would foresee the future without me.

‘If she behaves herself she should be safe. But God knows he is a king who has learned that he can do anything he wants in his own lands.’

‘You mean to his wives?’ she asks in a whisper.

He shrugs uneasily.

‘She would never give him cause to doubt her.’

‘She has to be warned. He will hold the power of life and death over her. He will be able to do what he likes to her. He will control her utterly.’

I am hidden in the shadows at the back of the room, and this revealing remark from my brother makes me smile. From this one phrase, I finally understand what has been troubling him for all these months. He is going to miss me. He is going to miss me like a master misses a lazy dog when he finally drowns it in a fit of temper. He has become so accustomed to bullying me, and finding fault with me, and troubling me in a dozen small daily ways, that now, when he thinks that another man will have the ordering of me, it plagues him. If he had ever loved me, I would call this jealousy; and it would be easy to understand. But it is not love that he feels for me. It is more like a constant resentment that has become such a habit to him that to have me removed, like an aching tooth, brings him no relief.

‘At least she will be of service to us in England,’ he says meanly. ‘She is worse than useless here. She has to bring him to reformed religion. She has to make him declare as a Lutheran. As long as she doesn’t spoil it all.’

‘How should she spoil it?’ my mother replies. ‘She has only to have a child by him. There is no great skill in that. Her health is good and her courses regular, and at twenty-four she’s a good age for childbearing.’ She considers for a moment. ‘He should desire her,’ she says fairly. ‘She is well-made, and she carries herself well, I have seen to that. He is a man who is given to lust and falling in love on sight. He will probably take great carnal pleasure in her at first, if only because she is new to him, and a virgin.’

My brother leaps up from his chair. ‘Shame!’ he says, his cheeks burning with more than the heat from the fire. Everyone stops talking at the sound of his raised voice, then quickly they turn away, trying not to stare. Quietly, I rise from my stool and get myself to the very back of the room. If his temper is rising, I had better slip away.

‘Son, I meant nothing wrong,’ Mother says, quick to placate him. ‘I just meant that she is likely to do her duty and please him …’

‘I can’t bear the thought of her …’ He breaks off. ‘I cannot stomach it! She must not seek him out!’ he hisses. ‘You must tell her. She must do nothing unmaidenly. She must do nothing wanton. You must warn her that she must be my sister, your daughter, before she is ever a wife. She must bear herself with coldness, with dignity. She is not to be his whore, she is not to act the part of some shameless, greedy …’

‘No, no,’ my mother says softly. ‘No, of course not. She isn’t like that, William, my lord, dear son. You know she has been most strictly raised, in fear of God and to respect her betters.’

‘Well, tell her again,’ he cries. Nothing will soothe him, I had better get away. He would be beside himself if he knew that I have seen him like this. I put my hand behind me and feel the comforting warmth of the thick tapestry covering the rear wall. I inch along, my dark dress almost invisible in the shadows of the room.

‘I saw her when that painter was here,’ he says, his voice thick. ‘Preening in her vanity, setting herself out. Laced … laced … tight. Her breasts … on show … trying to appear desirable. She is capable of sin, Mother. She is disposed to … She is disposed to … Her temperament is naturally filled with …’ He cannot say it.

‘No, no,’ Mother says gently. ‘She only wants to be a credit to us.’

‘… Lust.’

The word has become detached, it drops into the silence of the room as if it might belong to anybody, as if it might belong to my brother and not to me.

I am at the doorway now, my hand gently lifting the latch, my other finger muffling its click. Three of the women of the court casually rise and stand before me to mask my retreat from the two at the fireside. The door swings open on oiled hinges and makes no sound. The cold draught makes the candles at the fireside bob, but my brother and my mother are facing each other, rapt in the horror of that word, and do not turn around.

‘Are you sure?’ I hear her ask him.

I close the door before I hear him reply, and I go quickly and quietly to our chamber where the maids are sitting up by the fireside with my sister and playing cards. They scramble them off the table when I tear open the door and stride in, and then they laugh when they see it is me in their relief that they have not been caught out gambling: a forbidden pleasure for spinsters in my brother’s lands.

‘I’m going to bed, I have a headache, I’m not to be disturbed,’ I announce abruptly.

Amelia nods. ‘You can try,’ she says knowingly. ‘What have you done now?’

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘As always, nothing.’

I go through quickly to our privy chamber and fling my clothes into the chest at the foot of the bed and jump into bed in my shift, drawing the curtains around the bed, pulling the covers up. I shiver in the coldness of the linen, and wait for the order that I know will come.

In only a few moments, Amelia opens the door. ‘You’re to go to Mother’s rooms,’ she says triumphantly.

‘Tell her I’m ill. You should have said I’ve gone to bed.’

‘I told her. She said you have to get up and put on a cloak and go. What have you done now?’

I scowl at her bright face. ‘Nothing.’ I rise unwillingly from the bed. ‘Nothing. As always, I have done nothing.’ I pull my cloak from the hook behind the door and tie the ribbons from chin to knee.

‘Did you answer him back?’ Amelia demands gleefully. ‘Why do you always argue with him?’

I go out without replying, through the silenced chamber and down the steps to my mother’s rooms in the same tower on the floor below us.

At first it looks as if she is alone, but then I see the half-closed door to her privy chamber and I don’t need to hear him, and I don’t need to see him. I just know that he is there, watching.

She has her back to me at first, and when she turns I see she has the birch stick in her hand and her face is stern.

‘I have done nothing,’ I say at once.

She sighs irritably. ‘Child, is that any way to come into a room?’

I lower my head. ‘My lady mother,’ I say quietly.

‘I am displeased with you,’ she says.

I look up. ‘I am sorry for that. How have I offended?’

‘You have been called to a holy duty, you must lead your husband to the reformed church.’

I nod.

‘You have been called to a position of great honour and great dignity, and you must forge your behaviour to deserve it.’

Inarguable. I lower my head again.

‘You have an unruly spirit,’ she goes on.

True indeed.

‘You lack the proper traits of a woman: submission, obedience, love of duty.’

True again.

‘And I fear that you have a wanton streak in you,’ she says, very low.

‘Mother, that I have not,’ I say as quietly as her. ‘That is not true.’

‘You do. The King of England will not tolerate a wanton wife. The Queen of England must be a woman without a stain on her character. She must be above reproach.’

‘My lady mother, I …’

‘Anne, think of this!’ she says, and for once I hear a real ring of earnestness in her voice. ‘Think of this! He had the Lady Anne Boleyn executed for infidelity, accusing her of sin with half the court, her own brother among her lovers. He made her queen and then he unmade her again with no cause or evidence but his own will. He accused her of incest, witchcraft, crimes most foul. He is a man most anxious for his reputation, madly anxious. The next Queen of England must never be doubted. We cannot guarantee your safety if there is one word said against you!’

‘My lady …’

‘Kiss the rod,’ she says before I can argue.

I touch my lips to the stick as she holds it out to me. Behind her privy chamber door I can hear him slightly, very slightly, sigh.

‘Hold the seat of the chair,’ she orders.

I bend over and grip both sides of the chair. Delicately, like a lady lifting a handkerchief, she takes the hem of my cloak and raises it over my hips and then my night shift. My buttocks are naked, if my brother chooses to look through the half-open door he can see me, displayed like a girl in a bawdy house. There is a whistle of the rod through the air and then the sudden whiplash of pain across my thighs. I cry out, and then bite my lip. I am desperate to know how many cuts I will have to take. I grit my teeth together and wait for the next. The hiss through the air and then the slice of pain, like a sword-cut in a dishonourable duel. Two. The sound of the next comes too fast for me to make ready, and I cry out again, my tears suddenly coming hot and fast like blood.

‘Stand up, Anne,’ she says coolly, and pulls down my shift and my cloak.

The tears are pouring down my face, I can hear myself sobbing like a child.

‘Go to your room and read the Bible,’ she says. ‘Think especially on your royal calling. Caesar’s wife, Anne. Caesar’s wife.’

I have to curtsey to her. The awkward movement causes a wave of new pain and I whimper like a whipped puppy. I go to the door and open it. The wind blows the door from my hand and, in the gust, the inner door to her privy chamber flies open without warning. In the shadow stands my brother, his face strained as if it were him beneath the whip of the birch, his lips pressed tightly together as if to stop himself from calling out. For one awful moment our eyes meet and he looks at me, his face filled with a desperate need. I drop my eyes, I turn from him as if I have not seen him, as if I am blind to him. Whatever he wants of me, I know that I don’t want to hear it. I stumble from the room, my shift sticking to the blood on the backs of my thighs. I am desperate to get away from them both.

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth November 1539

‘I shall call you wife.’

‘I shall call you husband.’

It is so dark that I cannot see him smile; but I feel the curve of his lips as he kisses me again.

‘I shall buy you a ring and you can wear it on a chain around your neck and keep it hidden.’

‘I shall give you a velvet cap embroidered with pearls.’

He chuckles.

‘For God’s sake be quiet, and let us get some sleep!’ someone says crossly from elsewhere in the dormitory. It is probably Joan Bulmer, missing these very same kisses that I now have on my lips, on my eyelids, on my ears, on my neck, on my breasts, on every part of my body. She will be missing the lover who used to be hers, and now is mine.

‘Shall I go and kiss her goodnight?’ he whispers.

‘Ssshhh,’ I reprove him, and I stop his reply with my own mouth.

We are in the sleepy aftermath of lovemaking, the sheets tangled around us, clothes and linen all bundled together, the scent of his hair, of his body, of his sweat all over me. Francis Dereham is mine as I swore he would be.

‘You know that if we promise to marry before God and I give you a ring, then it is as much a marriage as if we were wed in church?’ he asks earnestly.

I am falling asleep. His hand is caressing my belly, I feel myself stir and sigh and I open my legs to invite his warm touch again.

‘Yes,’ I say, meaning yes to his touch.

He misunderstands me, he is always so earnest. ‘So shall we do it? Shall we marry in secret and always be together, and when I have made my fortune, we can tell everyone, and live together as man and wife?’

‘Yes, yes.’ I am starting to moan a little from pleasure, I am thinking of nothing but the movement of his clever fingers. ‘Oh, yes.’

In the morning he has to snatch his clothes and run, before my lady grandmother’s maid comes with much hustle and ceremony to unlock the door to our bedchamber. He dashes away just moments before we hear her heavy footstep on the stairs; but Edward Waldgrave leaves it too late and has to roll under Mary’s bed and hope the trailing sheets will hide him.

‘You’re merry this morning,’ Mrs Franks says suspiciously as we smother our giggles. ‘Laugh before seven, tears before eleven.’

‘That is a pagan superstition,’ says Mary Lascelles, who is always pious. ‘And there is nothing for these girls to laugh about if they considered their consciences.’

We look as sombre as we can, and follow her down the stairs to the chapel for Mass. Francis is in the chapel, on his knees, as handsome as an angel. He looks across at me and my heart turns over. It is so wonderful that he is in love with me.

When the service is done and everyone is in a hurry for their breakfast I pause in the pew to adjust the ribbons on my shoe and I see that he has dropped back to his knees as if deep in prayer. The priest slowly blows out the candles, packs up his things, waddles down the aisle and we are alone.

Francis comes across to me and holds out his hand. It is a most wonderfully solemn moment, it is as good as a play. I wish I could see us, especially my own serious face. ‘Katherine, will you marry me?’ he says.

I feel so grown up. It is I who am doing this, taking control of my own destiny. My grandmother has not made this marriage for me, nor my father. Nobody has ever cared for me, they have forgotten me, cooped up in this house. But I have chosen my own husband, I will make my own future. I am like my cousin Mary Boleyn, who married in secret a man that no-one liked and then picked up the whole Boleyn inheritance. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I will.’ I am like my cousin Queen Anne, who aimed at the highest marriage in the land when no-one thought it could be done. ‘Yes, I will,’ I say.

What he means by marrying, I don’t know exactly. I think that he means I will have a ring to wear on a chain, which I can show to the other girls, and that we will be promised to one another. But to my surprise he leads me up the aisle towards the altar. For a moment I hesitate, I don’t know what he wants to do, and I am no great enthusiast for praying. We will be late for breakfast if we don’t hurry and I like the bread when it is still warm from the ovens. But then I see that we are acting out our wedding. I so wish that I had put on my best gown this morning, but it is too late now.

‘I, Francis Dereham, do take thee, Katherine Howard, to be my lawful wedded wife,’ he says firmly.

I smile up at him. If only I had put on my best hood, I would be perfectly happy.

‘Now you say it,’ he prompts me.

‘I, Katherine Howard, do take thee, Francis Dereham, to be my lawful wedded husband,’ I reply obediently.

He bends and kisses me. I can feel my knees go weak at his touch, all I want is for the kiss to last forever. Already, I am wondering if we were to slip into my lady grandmother’s high-walled pew, we could go a little further than this. But he stops. ‘You understand that we are married now?’ he confirms.

‘This is our wedding?’

‘Yes.’

I giggle. ‘But I am only fourteen.’

‘That makes no difference, you have given your word in the sight of God.’ Very seriously he puts his hand in his jacket pocket and pulls out a purse. ‘There is one hundred pounds in here,’ he says solemnly. ‘I am going to give it into your safekeeping, and in the New Year I shall go to Ireland and make my fortune so that I can come home and claim you openly as my bride.’

The purse is heavy, he has saved a fortune for us. This is so thrilling. ‘I am to keep the money safe?’

‘Yes, as my good wife.’

This is so delightful that I give it a little shake and hear the coins chink. I can put it in my empty jewel box. ‘I shall be such a good wife to you! You will be so surprised!’

‘Yes. As I told you. This is a proper wedding in the sight of God. We are husband and wife now.’

‘Oh, yes. And when you have made your fortune, we can really marry, can’t we? With a new gown and everything?’

Francis frowns for a moment. ‘You do understand?’ he says. ‘I know you are young, Katherine, but you must understand this. We are married now. It is legal and binding. We cannot marry again. This is it. We have just done it. A marriage between two people in the sight of God is a marriage as binding as one signed on a contract. You are my wife now. We are married in the eyes of God and the law of the land. If anyone asks you, you are my wife, my legally wedded wife. You do understand?’

‘Of course I do,’ I reply hastily. I don’t want to look stupid. ‘Of course I understand. All I am saying is that I would like a new gown when we tell everybody.’

He laughs as if I have said something funny and takes me in his arms again and kisses the base of my throat and nuzzles his face into my neck. ‘I shall buy you a gown of blue silk, Mrs Dereham,’ he promises me.

I close my eyes in pleasure. ‘Green,’ I say. ‘Tudor green. The king likes green best.’

Jane Boleyn, Greenwich Palace, December 1539

Thank God I am here in Greenwich, the most beautiful of the king’s palaces, back where I belong in the queen’s rooms. Last time I was here I was nursing Jane Seymour as she burned up with fever, asking for Henry, who never came; but now the rooms have been repainted, and I have been restored and she has been forgotten. I alone have survived. I have survived the fall of Queen Katherine, the disgrace of Queen Anne and the death of Queen Jane. It is a miracle to me that I have survived but here I am, back at court, one of the favoured few, the very favoured few. I shall serve the new queen as I have served her predecessors, with love and loyalty and an eye to my own opportunities. I shall once again walk in and out of the best chambers of the best palaces of the land as my home. I am once again where I was born and bred to be.

Sometimes I can even forget everything that has happened. Sometimes, I forget I am a widow of thirty, with a son far away from me. I think I am a young woman again with a husband I worship, and everything to hope for. I am returned to the very centre of my world. Almost I could say: I am reborn.

The king has planned a Christmas wedding and the queen’s ladies are being assembled for the festivities. Thanks to my lord duke, I am one of them, restored to the friends and rivals I have known since my childhood. Some of them welcome me back with a wry smile and a backhand compliment, some of them look askance at me. Not that they loved Anne so much – not they – but they were frightened by her fall and they remember that I alone escaped, it is like magic that I escaped, it makes them cross themselves and whisper old rumours against me.

Bessie Blount, the king’s old mistress, now married far above her station to Lord Clinton, greets me kindly enough. I have not seen her since the death of her son Henry Fitzroy, who the king made a duke, Duke of Richmond, for nothing more than being a royal bastard, and when I say how sorry I am for her loss, shallow words of politeness, she suddenly grips my hand and looks at me, her face pale and demanding, as if to ask me wordlessly if I know how it was that he died? Will I tell her how he died?

I smile coolly and unwrap her fingers from my wrist. I cannot tell her because truly I don’t know, and if I did know I would not tell her. ‘I am very sorry for the loss of your son,’ I say again.

She will probably never know why he died nor how. But neither will thousands. Thousands of mothers saw their sons march out to protect the shrines, the holy places, the roadside statues, the monasteries and the churches, and thousands of sons never came home again. The king will decide what is faith and what is heresy, it is not for the people to say. In this new and dangerous world it is not even for the church to say. The king will decide who will live and who will die, he has the power of God now. If Bessie really wants to know who killed her son she had better ask the king his father; but she knows Henry too well to do that.

The other women have seen Bessie greet me and they come forwards: Seymours, Percys, Culpeppers, Nevilles. All the great families of the land have forced their daughters into the narrow compass of the queen’s rooms. Some of them know ill of me and some of them suspect worse. I don’t care. I have faced worse than the malice of envious women, and I am related to most of them anyway, and rival to them all. If anyone wants to make trouble for me they had better remember that I am under the protection of my lord duke, and only Thomas Cromwell is more powerful than us.

The one I dread, the one I really don’t want to meet, is Catherine Carey, the daughter of Mary Boleyn, my mean-spirited sister-in-law. Catherine is a child, a girl of fifteen, I should not fear her, but – to tell the truth – her mother is a formidable woman and never a great admirer of mine. My lord duke has won young Catherine a place at court and ordered her mother to send her to the fount of all power, the source of all wealth, and Mary, reluctant Mary, has obeyed. I can imagine how unwillingly she bought the child her gowns and dressed her hair and coached her in her curtsey and her dancing. Mary saw her family rise to the skies on the beauty and wit of her sister and her brother, and then saw their bodies packed in pieces in the little coffins. Anne was beheaded, her body wrapped in a box, her head in a basket. George, my George … I cannot bear to think of it.

Let it be enough to say that Mary blames me for all her grief and loss, blames me for the loss of her brother and sister, and never thinks of her own part in our tragedy. She blames me as if I could have saved them, as if I did not do everything in my power till that very day, the last day, on the scaffold, when in the end there was nothing anybody could do.

And she is wrong to blame me. Mary Norris lost her father Henry on the same day and for the same cause, and she greets me with respect and with a smile. She bears no grudge. She has been properly taught by her mother that the fire of the king’s displeasure can burn up anyone, there is no point in blaming the survivors who got out in time.

Catherine Carey is a maid of fifteen, she will share rooms with other young girls, with my cousin and hers, Katherine Howard, Anne Bassett, Mary Norris, with other ambitious maids who know nothing and hope for everything. I will guide and advise them as a woman who has served queens before. Catherine Carey will not be whispering to her friends of the time that she spent with her Aunt Anne in the Tower, the last-moment agreements, the scaffold-step promises, the reprieve that they swore was coming and yet never came. She will not tell them that we all let Anne go to the block – her saintly mother as guilty as any other. She has been raised as a Carey but she is a Boleyn, a king’s bastard and a Howard through and through; she will know to keep her mouth shut.

In the absence of the new queen we have to settle into the rooms without her. We have to wait. The weather has been bad for her journey and she is making slow progress from Cleves to Calais. They now think that she will not get here in time for a Christmas wedding. If I had been advising her I would have told her to face the danger, any danger, and come by ship. It is a long journey, I know, and the English Sea in winter is a perilous place, but a bride should not be late for her wedding day; and this king does not like to wait for anything. He is not a man to deny.

In truth, he is not the prince that he was. When I was first at court and he was the young husband of a beautiful wife, he was a golden king. They called him the handsomest prince in Christendom and that was not flattery. Mary Boleyn was in love with him, Anne was in love with him, I was in love with him. There was not one girl at court, nor one girl in the country, who could resist him. Then he turned against his wife, Queen Katherine, a good woman, and Anne taught him how to be cruel. Her court, her clever young merciless court, persecuted the queen into stubborn misery and taught the king to dance to our heretic tune. We tricked him into thinking that the queen had lied to him, then we fooled him into thinking that Wolsey had betrayed him. But then his suspicious mind, rootling like a pig, started to run beyond our control. He started to doubt us as well. Cromwell persuaded him that Anne had betrayed him, the Seymours urged him to believe that we were all in a plot. In the end the king lost something greater than a wife, even two wives; he lost his sense of trust. We taught him suspicion, and the golden boyish shine tarnished on the man. Now, surrounded by people who fear him, he has become a bully. He has become a danger, like a bear that has been baited into surly spite. He told the Princess Mary he would have her killed if she defied him, and then declared her a bastard and princess no more. The Princess Elizabeth, our Boleyn princess, my niece, he has declared illegitimate and her governess says that the child is not even properly clothed.

And lastly, this business with Henry Fitzroy, the king’s own son: one day to be legitimised and proclaimed the Prince of Wales, the next day dead of a mystery illness and my own lord told to bury him at midnight? His portraits destroyed, and all mention of him forbidden? What sort of a man is it who can see his son die and be buried without saying a word? What sort of a father can tell his two little girls that they are no children of his? What sort of a man can send his friends and his wife to the gallows and dance when their deaths are reported to him? What kind of a man is this, to whom we have given absolute power over our lives and souls?

And perhaps even worse than all of this: the good priests hanged from their own church beams, the devout men walking to the stake to be burned, their eyes down, their thoughts on heaven, the uprisings in the North and the East, and the king swearing that the rebels could trust him, that he would be advised by them, and then the dreadful betrayal that put the trusting fools on gallows in their thousands around the country, that made my lord Norfolk the butcher of his countrymen. This king has killed thousands, this king goes on killing thousands of his own people. The world outside England says he has run mad and waits for our rebellion. But like frightened dogs in the bear pit we dare do no more than watch him and snarl.

He is merry now, anyway, despite the new queen’s failure to arrive. I have yet to be presented to him but they tell me he will greet me and all her ladies kindly. He is at dinner when I steal into his rooms to see the new queen’s portrait that he keeps in his presence chamber. The room is empty, the portrait is on an easel lit by big square candles. She is a sweet-looking thing, it must be said. She has an honest face, a straight gaze from lovely eyes. I understand at once what he likes in her. She has no allure; there is no sensuality in her face. She does not look flirtatious or dangerous or sinful. She has no polish, she has no sophistication. She looks younger than her twenty-four years, I could even say she looks a little simple to my critical gaze. She will not be a queen as Anne was a queen; that is a certainty. This is not a woman who will turn court and country upside down to dance to a new tune. This is not a woman who will turn men half-mad with desire and demand that they write of love in poetry. And, of course, this is exactly what he wants now – never again to love a woman like Anne.

Anne has spoiled him for a challenge, perhaps forever. She set a fire under his court and in the end everything was burned up. He is like a man whose very eyebrows have been scorched, and I am the woman whose house is ashes. He does not want ever again to marry a desirable mistress. I never again want to smell smoke. He wants a wife at his side who is as steady as an ox at the plough, and then he can seek flirtation and danger and allure elsewhere.

‘A pretty picture,’ a man says behind me and I turn to see the dark hair and long, sallow face of my uncle, Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, the greatest man in the kingdom after the king himself.

I sweep him a deep curtsey. ‘It is indeed, sir,’ I say.

He nods, his dark eyes steady. ‘Do you think it will prove to be a good likeness?’

‘We’ll know soon enough, my lord.’

‘You can thank me for getting you a post in her household,’ he says casually. ‘It was my doing. I took it as a personal matter.’

‘I do thank you very much. I am in your debt for my life itself. You know, you have only ever to command me.’

He nods. He has never shown me kindness, except the once, one great favour: pulling me from the fire that burned down the court. He is a gruff man of few words. They say he only really loved one woman and that was Katherine of Aragon, and he watched her thrust down to poverty, neglect and death, in order to put his own niece in her place. So his affections are of little value, anyway.

‘You will tell me how things go on in her rooms,’ he says, nodding at the portrait. ‘As you always have done.’ He holds out his arm to me, he is giving me the honour of leading me into dinner. I curtsey again, he likes a show of deference, and I put my hand lightly on his arm. ‘I shall want to know if she pleases the king, when she conceives, who she sees, how she behaves, and if she brings in any Lutheran preachers. That sort of thing. You know.’

I know. We walk to the door together.

‘I expect her to try to lead him in the matter of religion,’ he says. ‘We can’t have that. We can’t have him turning any further to reform; the country won’t tolerate it. You must look at her books and see if she is reading any forbidden writing. And watch her ladies to see if they are spying on us, if they report to Cleves. If any of them express any heresy I want to know at once. You know what you have to do.’

I do. There is not a member of this wide-ranging family who does not know their task. We all work to maintain the power and wealth of the Howards and we stand together.

I can hear the roar of the feasting court from the hall as we walk towards it, serving men with great jugs of wine and platters of meat marching in line to serve the hundreds of people who dine every day with the king. In the gallery above are the people who have come to watch, to see the great monster that is the inner court of the noblest people, a beast with a hundred mouths and a million schemes, and two hundred eyes watching the king as the only source of all wealth, all power, and all favour.

‘You will find him changed,’ the duke says very softly, his mouth to my ear. ‘We all find him hard to please.’

I think of the spoiled boy who could be distracted in a moment with a joke or a bet or a challenge. ‘He was always flighty.’

‘He’s worse than that now,’ my lord says. ‘His temper shifts without warning, he is violent; he will lash out against Cromwell and hit him in the face, he can turn in a moment. He can take a rage that turns him scarlet. Something that pleases him in the morning can anger him at dinner. You should be warned.’

I nod. ‘They serve him on bended knee now.’ I notice the new fashion.

He gives a short laugh. ‘And they call him “Majesty”,’ he says. ‘“Your Grace” was good enough for the Plantaganets themselves; but not enough for this king. He has to be “Majesty” as if he were a god.’

‘People do this?’ I ask curiously. ‘This extreme honour?’

‘You will do it yourself,’ he tells me. ‘Henry will be as a god if he wishes, there is no-one who dares to deny him.’

‘The lords?’ I query, thinking of the pride of the great men of the kingdom who hailed this man’s father as an equal, whose loyalty gave him his throne.

‘You will see,’ my lord says grimly. ‘They have changed the laws of treason so that even to think of opposition is a capital offence. Nobody dares argue against him, there would be the knock on the door at midnight and a trip to the Tower for questioning and your wife a widow without even a trial.’

I look to the high table where the king is seated, a massive spreading bulk on his throne. He is cramming food into his mouth as we watch him, both hands up to his face, he is fatter than any man I have ever seen in my life before, his shoulders gross, his neck like an ox, his features dissolving into the moon-shaped vat of his face, fingers like swollen puddings.

‘My God, he has blown up like a monster!’ I exclaim. ‘What has become of him? Is he sick? I would not have known him. God knows he is not the prince he was.’

‘He is a danger,’ my lord says, his voice no more than a breath. ‘To himself in his indulgences, and to others in his temper. Be warned.’

I am shaken more than I show when I go to the table for the queen’s ladies. They make a space for me and greet me by name, many of them calling me cousin. I feel the king’s little piggy eyes on me and I sweep him a deep curtsey before I sit down on my stool. Nobody else pays any attention to the beast that the prince has become, it is like a fairytale and we are all blinded by an enchantment not to see the ruin of the man in this pig of a king.

I settle to my dinner and serve myself from the common platter, the best wine is poured into my cup. I look around the court. This is my home. I have known most of these people for all of my life, and thanks to the duke’s care in marrying all the Howard children to his own advantage, I am related to most of them. Like most of them, I have served one queen after another. Like most of them, I have followed my royal mistress in the fashion of hoods: gable hood, French hood, English hood; and in the fashion of praying: papist, reformist, English Catholic. I have stumbled in Spanish and I have chattered in French, and I have sat in thoughtful silence and sewed shirts for the poor. There is not much about the Queens of England that I have not known, that I have not seen. And soon I shall see the next one and know all about her: her secrets, her hopes, and her faults. I shall watch her and I shall make my reports to my lord duke. And perhaps, even in a court grown fearful under a king who is swelling into a tyrant, even without my husband, and even without Anne, I shall learn to be happy again.

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth, December 1539

And what shall I get for Christmas? I know I am to have an embroidered purse from my friend Agnes Restwold, a hand-copied page from a prayer book from Mary Lascelles (I’m so thrilled at the prospect of this I can hardly breathe) and two handkerchiefs from my grandmother. So far, so very dull indeed. But my dearest Francis is going to give me a shift of best embroidered linen, and I have woven him, with my own hands, and it has taken me days, an armband of my favourite colours. I am very pleased that he should love me so, and of course I love him too, but he has not bought me a ring as he promised, and he is sticking to his plan to go to Ireland to seek his fortune in the very next month, and then I shall be left all alone, and what is the point of that?

The court is at Greenwich for Christmas, I hoped it would be at Whitehall and then I might at least have gone to see the king eat his dinner. My uncle the duke is there, but he does not summon us; and although my grandmother went to dine she did not take me with her. Sometimes I think that nothing will ever happen for me. Nothing will ever happen at all and I will live and die an old spinster in my grandmother’s service. I shall be fifteen next birthday and clearly no-one has given a single thought to my future. Who ever cares for me? My mother is dead and my father barely remembers my name. It is terribly sad. Mary Lumleigh is to be married next year, they are drawing up the contract now, and she makes much of herself and queens it over me, as though I cared for her and for her pimply betrothed. I should not want such a match if it were offered to me with a fortune attached, and so I told her, and so we have quarrelled and the lace collar she was going to give me for Christmas will be given to someone else, and I do not care about that either.

The queen should be in London by now but she has been so stupidly slow that she is delayed, so all my hopes of her great entry into London and a wonderful wedding have been put off too. It is as if the very fates themselves work to make me unhappy. I am doomed. All I want is a little dancing! Anyone would think that a girl of nearly fifteen, or at any rate fifteen next year, could go dancing once before she dies!

Of course we will have dancing here for Christmas, but that is not what I mean at all. What is the pleasure in dancing when everyone who sees you has seen you every day for a year before? What’s the pleasure in a feast when every boy in the room is as familiar as the tapestries on the walls? Where’s the joy in having a man’s eyes on you when he is your own man, your own husband, and he would come to your bed whether you dance prettily or not? I try a special turn and curtsey that I have been practising and it does me no good at all. Nobody seems to notice except my grandmother, who sees everything, and she calls me out of the line and puts her finger under my chin and says: ‘Child, there is no need to twinkle around like some slut of an Italian. We all watch you anyway.’ By which I am supposed to understand that I should not dance like a lady, like an elegant young lady, with some style; but like a child.

I curtsey and say nothing. There is no point in arguing with my lady grandmother, she has such a temper she can send me from the room in a moment if I so much as open my mouth. I really do think I am very cruelly treated.

‘And what’s this I hear about you and young Master Dereham?’ she suddenly asks. ‘I thought I had warned you once already?’

‘I don’t know what you hear, Grandmother,’ I say cleverly.

Too clever for her, because she raps my hand with her fan.

‘Don’t forget who you are, Katherine Howard,’ she says sharply. ‘When your uncle sends for you to wait on the queen, I take it you will not want to refuse because of some greensick flirtation?’

‘Wait on the queen?’ I go at once to the most important thing.

‘Perhaps,’ she says maddeningly. ‘Perhaps she will have need of a maid in waiting if the girl has been gently raised and is not known to be an utter slut.’

I cannot speak, I am so desperate. ‘Grandmother … I …’

‘Never mind,’ she says and waves me away back to the dancers. I clutch at her sleeve and beg to know more; but she laughs and sends me to dance. As she is watching me, I hop about like a little wooden doll, I am so correct in the steps and so polite in my deportment that you would think I had a crown on my head myself. I dance like a nun, I dance like a vestal virgin, and when I look up to see if she is impressed by my modesty she is laughing at me.

So that night, when Francis comes to the chamber door, I meet him on the threshold. ‘You can’t come in,’ I say bluntly. ‘My lady grandmother knows all about us. She warned me for my reputation.’

He looks shocked. ‘But my love …’

‘I can’t risk it,’ I insist. ‘She knows far more than we thought. God knows what she has heard or who has told her.’

‘We would not deny each other,’ he says.

‘No,’ I say uncertainly.

‘If she asks you, you must tell her that we are married in the eyes of God.’

‘Yes, but …’

‘And I shall come to you as your husband now.’

‘You can’t.’ Nothing in this world is going to prevent me from being the new queen’s maid in waiting. Not even my undying love for Francis.

He puts his hand around my waist and nibbles at the nape of my neck. ‘I shall be going to Ireland within days,’ he whispers softly. ‘You will not send me away with my heart breaking.’

I hesitate. It would be very sad for his heart to break, but I have to be maid in waiting to the new queen, there is nothing more important than that.

‘I don’t want your heart to break,’ I say. ‘But I have to take a post in the queen’s household, and who knows what might happen?’

He lets me go abruptly. ‘Oh, so you think you’re going to go to court?’ he asks crossly. ‘And flirt with some great lord? Or one of your noble cousins or someone? A Culpepper or a Mowbray or a Neville or someone?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. It is really marvellous how dignified I can be. You would think I was my grandmother. ‘I cannot discuss my plans with you now.’

‘Kitty!’ he cries, he is torn between anger and lust. ‘You are my wife, you are my promised wife! You are my own beloved!’

‘I must ask you to withdraw,’ I say very grandly, and I close the door in his face and run and take a flying leap into my bed.

‘What now?’ asks Agnes. At the far end of the dormitory they have drawn the curtains around the bed, some boy and some loose girl are lovemaking, and I can hear his eager panting and her sighing.

‘Can’t you be quiet?’ I shout down the long room. ‘It’s really shocking. It is offensive to a young maid such as me. It’s shocking. It really shouldn’t be allowed.’

Anne, Calais, December 1539

In all this long journey I have started to learn how I shall be when I am queen. The English ladies that my lord the king sent to be with me have spoken English to me every day, and my lord Southampton has been at my side at every town we have entered, and has prompted me and guided me in the most helpful way. They are a most formal and dignified people, everything has to be done by rote, by rule, and I am learning to hide my excitement at the greetings, the music, and the crowds who everywhere come out to see me. I don’t want to seem like the country sister of a minor duke, I want to be like a queen, a true Queen of England.

At every town I have had a welcome of people thronging in the streets, calling out my name and bringing me posies and gifts. Most towns present me with a loyal address and give me a purse of gold or some valuable jewellery. But my arrival in my first English town, the port of Calais, is dwarfing everything that went before. It is a mighty English castle with a great walled town around it, built to withstand any attack from France, the enemy, just outside the powerfully guarded gates. We enter by the south gate that looks over the road towards the kingdom of France and we are greeted by an English nobleman, Lord Lisle, and dozens of gentlemen and noblemen, dressed very fine, with a small army of men dressed in red and blue livery.

I thank God for sending me Lord Lisle to be my friend and advisor in these difficult days for he is a kind man, with something of the look of my father. Without him, I would be speechless from terror as well as from my lack of English. He is dressed as fine as a king himself, and there are so very many English noblemen with him that they are like a sea of furs and velvet. But he takes my cold hand in his big warm grip and he smiles at me and says ‘Courage’. I may not know the word till I ask my interpreter, but I know a friend when I see one, and I find a small peaky smile and then he tucks my hand into the crook of his arm and leads me down the broad street to the harbour. The bells are pealing a welcome to me, and all the merchants’ wives and children are lining the streets to have a look at me and the apprentice boys and servants all shout, ‘Anna of Cleves, hurrah!’ as I go by.

In the harbour there are two huge ships, the king’s own, one called the Sweepstake, which means something about gambling, and one named the Lion, both flying banners and sounding the trumpets as they see me approach. They have been sent from England to bring me to the king, and with them comes a huge fleet to escort me. The gunners fire off rounds, and the cannon roar, and the whole town is drenched in smoke and noise, but this is a great compliment and so I smile and try not to flinch. We go on to the Staple Hall where the mayor of the town and the merchants give me greetings in long speeches and two purses of gold and Lady Lisle, who is here to greet me with her husband, presents my ladies in waiting to me.

They all accompany me back to the king’s house, the Chequer, and I stand as one after another comes forwards and says their name and presents their compliments and makes their bow or their curtsey. I am so tired and so overwhelmed by the whole day that I feel my knees start to weaken underneath me but still they come on, one after another. My lady Lisle stands beside me and says each name in my ear and tells me a little about them, but I cannot understand her words and, besides, there are too many strangers to take it all in. It is a dizzying crowd of people; but they are all smiling kindly at me, and they all bow so respectfully. I ought to be glad of such attention and not overwhelmed by it, I know.

As soon as the last lady, maid, servant and page has made their bow, and I can decently leave, I say that I should like to go to my privy chamber before we dine, and my interpreter tells them; but still I cannot be at peace. As soon as we walk into my private rooms there are more strange faces waiting to be presented as servants and members of my privy chamber. I am so exhausted by all these introductions that I say I should like to go to my bedchamber, but even here I cannot be alone. In comes Lady Lisle and other ladies and the maids in waiting to make sure that I have everything I need. A full dozen of them come in and pat the bed and straighten the curtains and stand about, looking at me. In absolute desperation I say that I want to pray and go into the little closet beside the bedchamber and close the door on their helpful faces.

I can hear them waiting outside, like an audience waiting for a fool to come out and juggle or play tricks: a little puzzled at the delay, but good-humoured enough. I lean back against the door and touch my forehead with the back of my hand. I am cold and yet I am sweating, as if I were ill with a fever. I must do this. I know I can do this, I know I can be Queen of England, and a good queen as well. I will learn their language; already I can understand most of what is said to me, though I stumble over speech. I will learn all these new names and their rank and the proper way to address them so that I won’t always have to stand like a little doll with a puppet-master beside me, telling me what to do. As soon as I get to England I shall see about ordering some new clothes. My ladies and I, in our German dress, look like fat little ducks beside these English swans. They go about half-naked with hardly a hood on their heads at all, they flit about in their light gowns, while we are strapped into fustian as if we were lumpy parcels. I shall learn to be elegant, I shall learn to be pleasing, I shall learn to be a queen. I shall certainly learn to meet a hundred people without sweating for fear.

It strikes me now that they will be finding my behaviour very odd. First, I say I want to dress for dinner, and then I step into a room that is little more than a cupboard, and make them wait outside. I will seem ridiculously devout or, worse, they will know I am painfully shy. As soon as this occurs to me I freeze inside the little room. I feel such a country-born dolt. I hardly know how to find the courage to come out.

I listen at the door. It has gone very quiet outside, perhaps they have become tired of waiting for me. Perhaps they have all gone off to change their clothes again. Hesitantly, I open the door a crack and look out.

There is only one lady left in the room, seated at the window, calmly looking down into the yard below, watching. As she hears the betraying creak of the door she looks up and her face is kind and interested.

‘Lady Anne?’ she says, and she rises to her feet and curtseys to me.

‘I …’

‘I am Jane Boleyn,’ she says, guessing rightly that I cannot remember a single name from the blur of this morning. ‘I am one of your ladies in waiting.’

As she says her name I am utterly confused. She must be some relation to Anne Boleyn; but what is she doing in my chamber? Surely she cannot be here to wait on me? Surely she should be in exile, or in disgrace?

I look around for someone to translate for us, and she smiles and shakes her head. She points to herself and says ‘Jane Boleyn,’ and then she says, very slowly and steadily: ‘I will be your friend.’

And I understand her. Her smile is warm and her face honest. I realise that she means that she will be a friend to me; and the thought of having a friend I can trust in this sea of new people and new faces brings a lump into my throat and I blink back the tears and I put out my hand to her to shake, as if I were a half-simple countrywoman in the market place.

‘Boleyn?’ I stammer.

‘Yes,’ she says, taking my hand in her cool grip. ‘And I know all about how fearful it is to be Queen of England. Who would know better than me how hard it can be? I will be your friend,’ she says again. ‘You can trust me.’ And she shakes my hand with a warm grasp, and I believe her, and we both smile.

Jane Boleyn, Calais, December 1539

She will never please him, poor child, not in a lifetime, not in a thousand years. I am amazed that his ambassadors did not warn him, they have been thinking entirely of making a league against France and Spain, of a Protestant league against the Catholic kings, and thinking nothing of the tastes of King Henry.

There is nothing she can do to become the sort of woman that pleases him. His preference runs to quick-witted, dainty, smiling women with an air that promises everything. Even Jane Seymour, though she was quiet and obedient, radiated a docile warmth that hinted at sensual pleasure. But this one is like a child, awkward like a child, with a child’s honest gaze and an open, friendly smile. She looks thrilled when someone bows low to her, and when she first saw the ships in the harbour she seemed about to applaud. When she is tired or overwhelmed she goes pale like a sulky child and looks ready to weep. Her nose goes red when she is anxious, like a peasant in the cold. If it were not so tragic this would be the highest of comedies, this gawky girl stepping into the diamond-heeled shoes of Anne Boleyn. What can they have been thinking of when they imagined she could ever rise to it?

But her very awkwardness gives me a key to her. I can be her friend, her great friend and ally. She will need a friend, poor lost girl, she will need a friend who knows the way around a court such as ours. I can introduce her to all the things she will need to know, teach her the skills she must learn. And who should know better than I, who have been at the heart of the greatest court that England ever had, and seen it burn itself up? Who better than me to keep a queen safe, who watched one destroy herself and destroy her family with her? I have promised to be this new queen’s friend and I can honour that promise. She is young, only twenty-four years old, but she will grow. She is ignorant but she can be taught. She is inexperienced but life will correct that. I can do much for this quaint young woman, and it will be a real pleasure and an opportunity to be her guide and mentor.

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth, December 1539

My uncle is coming to see my grandmother and I must be ready in case he sends for me. We all know what is about to happen but I am as excited as if I were waiting for a great surprise. I have practised my walk towards him and my curtsey. I have practised my look of astonishment and my delighted smile at the wonderful news. I like to be prepared, I like to be rehearsed, and I have had Agnes and Joan play the part of my uncle until I am step-perfect in my approach, my curtsey and my genteel cry of joy.

The maids’ room is sick of me, sick as if they had eaten a glut of green apples, but I tell them it is only to be expected, I am a Howard, of course I will be called to court, of course I will serve the queen and, sadly, of course they will be left behind; what a pity.

They say I will have to learn German, and there will be no dancing. I know this is a lie. She will live like a queen and if she is dull, I shall only shine more brightly in contrast. They say it is well-known that she will live in seclusion, and the Dutch eat no meat but only cheese and butter all day. I know this is a lie – why else would the queen’s apartments at Hampton Court have been repainted but for her to have a court and guests? They say that all her ladies have already been appointed and half of them have already left to meet her in Calais. My uncle is coming to tell me that I have missed my chance.

This, finally, frightens me. I know that the king’s nieces, Lady Margaret Douglas and the Marchioness of Dorset, have agreed to be the chiefest of her ladies and I fear it is too late for me. ‘No,’ I say to Mary Lascelles, ‘he cannot be coming to tell me I must stay here. He cannot be coming to tell me that I am too late, that there will be no place left for me.’

‘And if he does then let it be a lesson to you,’ she says firmly. ‘Let it be a lesson to you to mend your ways. You don’t deserve to go to the queen’s court as light as you have been with Francis Dereham. No true lady should have you in her chambers when you have played the slut with such a man.’

This is so unkind that I give a little gasp and feel the tears coming.

‘Now don’t cry,’ she says wearily. ‘Don’t cry, Katherine. You will only make your eyes red.’

Instantly, I hold my nose to stop the tears coming. ‘But if he tells me I am to stay here and do nothing I shall die!’ I say thickly. ‘I will be fifteen next year, and then I will be eighteen, and then I will be nineteen and then I will be twenty and too old for marriage and I will die here, serving my grandmother, never having been anywhere, and never seen anything, and never danced at court.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ she exclaims crossly. ‘Can you never think of anything but your vanity, Katherine? Besides, some would think you have done quite enough already for a maid of fourteen.’

‘Duthing,’ I say, with my nose still pinched. I let it go and press my cool fingers against my cheeks. ‘I have done nothing.’

‘Of course, you will serve the queen,’ she says scornfully. ‘Your uncle is not likely to miss such a place for one of his family, however badly you have behaved.’

‘The girls said …’

‘The girls are jealous of you because you are going, you ninny. If you were staying they would be all over you with pretend sympathy.’

This is so true that even I can see it. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘So wash your face again and come to my lady’s chamber. Your uncle will be here at any moment.’

I go as fast as I can, pausing only to tell Agnes and Joan and Margaret that I know full well I am going to court and that I never believed their spite for a moment, and then I hear them shouting: ‘Katherine! Katherine! He is here!’ and I dash down to my lady’s own parlour and there he is, my uncle, standing before the fire and warming his backside.

It would take more than a fire to warm this man through. My grandmother says that he is the king’s hammer; whenever there is hard and dirty work to do it is my uncle who leads the English army to batter the enemy into submission. When the North rose up to defend the old religion just two years ago when I was a little girl, it was my uncle who brought the rebels to their senses. He promised them a pardon and then cozened them to the gallows. He saved the king’s throne and he saved the king the trouble of fighting his own battles and putting down a great rebellion. My grandmother says that he knows no other argument but the noose. She says he strung up thousands even though inwardly, he agreed with their cause. His own faith did not stop him. Nothing will stop him. I can see by his face that he is a hard man, a man not easily softened; but he has come to see me and I will show him what sort of niece he has.

I dip down into a deep curtsey, as we have practised over and over again in the maids’ chamber, leaning a little forwards so that my lord can see the tempting curve of my breasts pressed at the top of my gown. Slowly I look up at his face before I rise, so that he sees me almost on my knees before him, giving him a moment to think about the pleasure of what I could be doing down there, my little nose almost against his breeches. ‘My lord uncle,’ I breathe as I rise, as if I were whispering it in his ear in bed. ‘Give you a very good day, sir.’

‘Good God,’ he says bluntly, and my grandmother gives a little ‘Huh’ of amusement.

‘She is a … a credit to you, ma’am,’ he says as I rise without wobbling and stand before him. I clasp my hands behind my back to present my breasts to their full advantage, and I arch my back too so that he can admire the slimness of my waist. With my eyes modestly cast down I could be a schoolgirl except for the thrust of my body and the little half-hidden smile.

‘She is a Howard girl through and through,’ says my grandmother, who has no great opinion of Howard girls, known as we are for beauty and forwardness.

‘I was expecting a child,’ he says as if he is very pleased to find me grown.

‘A very knowing child.’ She gives me a hard look to remind me that nobody wants to know what I have learned while in her care. I widen my eyes innocently. I was seven years old when I first saw a maid bedding a pageboy, I was eleven when Henry Manox first got hold of me. How did she think I would turn out?

‘She will do very nicely,’ he says, after he has taken a moment to recover. ‘Katherine, can you dance and sing and play the lute and so on?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Read, write, in English and French, and Latin?’

I shoot an anguished look at my grandmother. I am tremendously stupid, and everyone knows it. I am so stupid that I don’t even know if I should lie about it or not.

‘Why would she need that?’ she asks. ‘The queen speaks nothing but Dutch, doesn’t she?’

He nods. ‘German. But the king likes an educated woman.’

The duchess smiles. ‘He did once,’ she says. ‘The Seymour girl was no great philosopher. I think he has lost his taste for argument from his wives. Do you like an educated woman?’

He gives a little snort at this. The whole world knows that he and his wife have been parted for years, they hate each other so much.

‘Anyway, what matters most is that she pleases the queen and pleases the court,’ my uncle rules. ‘Katherine, you are to go to court and be one of the new queen’s maids in waiting.’

I beam at him.

‘You are glad to go?’

‘Yes, my lord uncle. I am very grateful,’ I remember to add.

‘You have been placed in such a position of importance to be a credit to your family,’ he says solemnly. ‘Your grandmother here tells me you are a good girl and that you know how to behave. Make sure that you do, and don’t let us down.’

I nod. I dare not look at my grandmother, who knew all about Henry Manox, and who caught me once in the upper hall with Francis, with my hand down the front of his breeches and the mark of his bite on my neck, and called me a whore in the making and a stupid slut, and gave me a cuff that made my head ring, and warned me off him again at Christmas.

‘There will be young men who may pay attention to you,’ my uncle warns, as if I have never met a young man before. I dart a look at my grandmother but she is blandly smiling. ‘Remember that nothing is more important than your reputation. Your honour must be without stain. If I hear any unbecoming gossip about you – and I mean anything, and you can be sure that I hear everything – then I will remove you immediately from court and send you not even here, but back to your step-grandmother’s house in the country at Horsham. Where I will leave you forever. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, my lord uncle.’ It comes out in a terrified whisper. ‘I promise.’

‘I will see you at court almost daily,’ he says. I am almost beginning to wish that I was not going. ‘And from time to time I shall send for you to come to my rooms and tell me how you are getting on with the queen, and so on. You will be discreet and you will not gossip. You will keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. You will take advice from your kinswoman Jane Boleyn, who is also in the queen’s rooms. You will endeavour to become close to the queen, you shall be her little friend. From the favour of princes comes wealth. Never forget it. This could be the making of you, Katherine.’

‘Yes, my lord uncle.’

‘And another thing,’ he says warningly.

‘Yes, uncle?’

‘Modesty, Katherine. It is a woman’s greatest asset.’

I sink into a curtsey, my head bowed, as modest as a nun. A laugh of derision from my grandmother tells me that she is not persuaded. But when I look up my uncle is smiling.

‘Convincing. You can go,’ he says.

I curtsey again and I flee from the room before he can say anything worse. I have been longing to go to court for the dancing and young men and he makes it sound like going into service.

‘What did he say? What did he say?’ They are all waiting in the great hall, desperate to know the news.

‘I am to go to court!’ I crow. ‘And I am to have new gowns and new hoods and he says I will be the prettiest girl in the queen’s chamber, and there will be dancing every night, and I daresay I will never see any of you ever again.’

Anne, Calais, December 1539

The weather to cross the English Sea is, thank God, fair at last, after days of delay. I hoped that I would have a letter from home before we set sail, but though we have had to wait and wait for good weather for the crossing, no-one has written to me. I thought that Mother might have written to me; even if she is not missing me I thought she might have sent me some words of advice. I thought Amelia might already be hoping for a visit to England and might write me a letter of sisterly greeting. I could almost laugh at myself tonight, to think how low my spirits must be if I am wanting a letter from Amelia.

The only one I was certain of was my brother. I was sure I would have a letter from him. He never regained his temper with me, not in all the long preparation of leaving, and we parted on the terms that we have lived all our lives: on my side with a resentful fearfulness of his power, and on his side with an irritation that he cannot voice. I thought that he might write to me to appoint me with business to transact at the English court; surely I should be representing my country and our interests? But there are all the Cleves lords who are travelling with me, no doubt he has spoken or written to them. He must have decided that I am not fit to do business for him.

I thought at any rate that he was certain to write to me to lay down rules for my conduct. After all, he has spent his life dominating me, I did not think he would just let me go. But it seems I am free of him. Instead of being glad of that, I am uneasy. It is strange to leave my family, and none of them even send me Godspeed.

We are to set sail tomorrow in the early morning to catch the tide and I am waiting in my rooms in the king’s house, the Chequer, for Lord Lisle to come for me when I hear something like an argument in the presence chamber outside. By luck my Cleves translator, Lotte, is with me and at a nod from me she crosses quietly to the door and listens to the rapid English speech. Her expression is intent, she frowns, and then, when she hears footsteps coming, she scurries back into the room and sits beside me.

Lord Lisle bows as he comes into the room but his colour is up. He smooths down his velvet jerkin, as if to compose himself. ‘Forgive me, Lady Anne,’ he says. ‘The house is upside down with packing. I will come for you in an hour.’

She whispers his meaning to me and I bow and smile. He glances back at the door. ‘Did she hear us?’ he asks Lotte bluntly, and she turns to me to see me nod. He comes closer.

‘Secretary Thomas Cromwell is of your religion,’ he says quietly. Lotte whispers the German words into my ear so that I can be sure of understanding him. ‘He has wrongly protected some hundreds of Lutherans in this city which is under my command.’

I understand the words, of course, but not their significance.

‘They are heretics,’ he says. ‘They deny the authority of the king as a spiritual leader, and they deny the sacred miracle of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, that his wine becomes blood. This is the belief of the Church of England. To deny it is a heresy punished with death.’

I put my hand gently on Lotte’s arm. I know these are most perilous matters, but I don’t know what I should say.

‘Secretary Cromwell himself could be charged with heresy if the king knew that he had sheltered these men,’ Lord Lisle says. ‘I was telling his son, Gregory, that these men should be charged, whoever protects them. I was warning him that I cannot look to one side, I was warning him that good Englishmen think as I do, that God will not be mocked.’

‘I know nothing of these English matters,’ I say carefully. ‘I wish only to be guided by my husband.’ I think briefly of my brother who has charged me with bringing my husband away from these Papist superstitions into the clarity of reform. I think I shall have to disappoint him again.

Lord Lisle nods, he bows and steps back. ‘Forgive me,’ he says. ‘I should not have troubled you with this. I just wanted to make clear that I resent Thomas Cromwell’s protection of these people and that I am wholly loyal to the king and to his church.’

I nod, for what else can I say or do? And he goes out of the room. I turn to Lotte.

‘That’s not quite right,’ she says very quietly. ‘He did accuse the Master Cromwell of protecting Lutherans, but the son, Gregory Cromwell, accused him of being a secret Papist, and said that he would be watched. They were threatening each other.’

‘What does he expect me to do?’ I ask blankly. ‘He can hardly think that I would judge on such a matter?’

She looks troubled. ‘Perhaps to speak to the king? To influence him?’

‘Lord Lisle as good as told me that in his eyes I am a heretic myself. I deny that the wine turns into blood. Anyone of any sense must know that such a thing cannot happen.’

‘Do they really execute heretics in England?’ the woman asks nervously.

I nod.

‘How?’

‘They burn them at the stake.’

At her aghast expression I am about to explain that the king knows of my faith and is supposed to be allying with my Protestant brother and his league of Protestant dukes; but there is a shout at the door and the ships are ready to leave.

‘Come on,’ I say with a sudden rush of bravado. ‘Let’s go anyway, whatever the dangers. Nothing can be worse than Cleves.’

Setting sail from an English port on an English ship feels like the start of a new life. Most of my companions from Cleves will leave me now, so there are more leave-takings, and then I board the ship and we cast off, the rowing barges take the ships into tow out of the harbour, and they raise the sails and they catch the wind and the sails start to creak and the ship lifts up as if it would take flight, and now, at this moment, I feel truly that I am a queen going to my country, like a queen in a story.

I go to the bow and stare over the side at the moving water, at the crest of white waves on the black sea, and wonder when I shall see my new home, my kingdom, my England. All around me are the other little lights on the ships that are sailing with us. It is a fleet of ships, fifty great vessels, the queen’s fleet, and I am coming to realise the wealth and power of my new country.

We are to sail all the day, they say the sea is calm but the waves look very high and dangerous to me. The little ships climb up one wall of water and then belly down to the trough between the waves. Sometimes we lose sight of the other ships in the fleet altogether. The sails billow and creak as if they would tear, and the English sailors haul on ropes and dash around the deck like blasphemous madmen. I watch the dawn break, a grey sun over a grey sea, and I feel the immensity of the water all around me and even beneath me, then I go to rest in my cabin. Some of the ladies are sick, but I feel well. Lady Lisle sits with me for some of the day and some of the others, Jane Boleyn among them. I shall have to learn the names of all the others. The day goes slowly by, I go up on deck but all I can see are the ships around us, almost as far as I can see is the English fleet, keeping company with me. I should feel proud at this attention being paid to me, but more than anything else I feel uncomfortable at being the centre and the cause of so much trouble and activity. The sailors on the ship all pull off their caps and bow whenever I come out of the cabin, and two of the ladies always have to escort me, even if it is just to the prow of the ship. After a while, I feel so conspicuous, so restless, that I force myself to sit still in my cabin and watch the waves going up and down through the little window rather than inconvenience everyone by wandering about.

The first sight I have of England is a dark shadow on darkening seas. It is getting late by the time we come into a tiny port called Deal, but even though it is dark and raining, I am greeted by even more grand people. They take me to rest in the castle, and to eat, and there are hundreds, truly hundreds, of people who come to kiss my hand and welcome me to my country. In a haze I meet lords and their ladies, a bishop, the warden of the castle, some more ladies who will serve in my chamber, some maids who will be my companions. Clearly, I will never be alone again for another moment in all my life.

As soon as we have eaten we are all to move on, there is a strict plan as to where we shall stay and where we shall dine, but they ask me very courteously, am I ready to travel now? I learn quickly that this does not mean, in truth, would I like to leave? It means, that the plan says we should go now, and they are waiting for me to give my assent.

So even though it is evening and I am so tired I would give a fortune to rest here, I climb into the litter that my brother equipped for me at such begrudged expense, and the lords mount their horses and the ladies mount theirs and we rattle on the road in the darkness with soldiers before us and behind us as if we were an invading army, and I remind myself that I am queen now, and if this is how queens travel and how they are served then I must become accustomed to it, and not long for a quiet bed and a meal without an audience watching my every move.

We stay this night in the castle in Dover, arriving in darkness. The next day I am so weary I can hardly rise, but there are half a dozen maids holding my shift and my gown and my hairbrush and my hood, and maids in waiting standing behind them, and ladies in waiting behind them, and a message comes from the Duke of Suffolk as to whether I would like to journey on to Canterbury once I have said my prayers and broken my fast? I know from this that he is anxious that we should leave and that I should hurry to say my prayers and eat, and so I say that I shall be delighted, and that I myself am keen to press on.

This is clearly a lie since it has been raining all the night and now it is getting heavier and it is starting to hail. But everyone prefers to believe that I am anxious to see the king, and my ladies wrap me up as well as they can and then we trudge out of the courtyard with a gale blowing, and we set off up the road they call Watling Street to the town of Canterbury.

The archbishop himself, Thomas Cranmer, a gentle man with a kind smile, greets me on the road outside the city, and rides alongside my litter as we travel the last half a mile. I stare out through the driving rain; this was the great pilgrim road for the faithful going to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at the cathedral. I can see the spire of the church long before I can see even the walls of the town, it is built so high and so beautiful, and the light catches it through dark clouds as if God was touching the holy place. The road is paved here and every other house alongside was built to accommodate pilgrims, who used to come from all over Europe to pray at this most beautiful shrine. This was once one of the great holy sites of the world – just a few short years ago.

It’s all changed now. Changed as much as if they had thrown the church down. My mother has warned me not to remark on what we had heard of the king’s great changes, nor on what I see – however shocking. The king’s own commissioners went to the shrine of the great saint and took the treasure that had been offered at the shrine. They went into the vaults and raided the very coffin that held the saint’s body. It is said that they took his martyred body and threw it on the midden outside the city walls, they were so determined to destroy this sacred place.

My brother would say it is a good thing that the English have turned their backs on superstition and Popish practices, but my brother does not see that the houses for pilgrims have been taken over by bawdy houses and inns and there are beggars without anywhere to go all along the roads into Canterbury. My brother does not know that half the houses in Canterbury were hospitals for the poor and sick and that the church paid for poor pilgrims to stay and be nursed back to health and that the nuns and monks spent their lives serving the poor. Now our soldiers have to push their way through a murmuring crowd of people who are looking for the holy refuge that they were promised; but it has all gone. I take care to say nothing when our cavalcade turns through great gates and the archbishop dismounts from his horse to welcome me into a beautiful house that was clearly an abbey, perhaps only months ago. I look around as we go into a beautiful hall where travellers would have been freely entertained, and where the monks would have dined. I know that my brother wants me to lead this country still further away from superstition and papacy, but he has not seen what has been spoiled in this country in the name of reform.

The windows, which were once made of coloured glass to show beautiful stories, have been smashed so carelessly that the stone is broken and the tracery of stonework is all crushed. If a naughty boy did such a thing to windows he would be whipped. High in the vaulting roof were little angels and, I think, a frieze of saints, which has been knocked out by some fool with a hammer who cared for nothing. It is foolish, I know, to grieve for things of stone; but the men who did this godly work did not do it in a godly way. They could have taken the statues down and made good the walls after. But instead, they just knocked off the heads, and left the little angel bodies headless. How this serves the will of God, I cannot know.

I am a daughter of Cleves and we have turned against papacy and rightly; but I have not seen this sort of stupidity before. I can’t think why men would believe that it is a better world where something beautiful is destroyed and something broken left in its place. Then they take me to my rooms, which clearly once belonged to the prior. They have been replastered and repainted and still smell of new limewash. And here I start to realise the real reason for religious reform in this country. This beautiful building, and the lands on which it stands, the great farms which pay it rent and the flocks of sheep which bear its wool, once all belonged to the church and to the Pope. The church was the greatest landowner in England. Now all that wealth belongs to the king. For the first time I realise that this is not just a matter of the worship of God. Perhaps it is nothing to do with God. There is the greed of man here too.

There is vanity as well, perhaps. For Thomas à Becket was a saint who defied a tyrant King of England. His body lay in the crypt of this most lavish cathedral, encased in gold and jewels, and the king himself – who ordered the throwing down of this shrine – used to come here to pray for help. But now the king needs no help, and rebels are hanged in this country, and the wealth and beauty must all belong to the king. My brother would say that this is a good thing and that a country cannot have two masters.

I am wearily changing my gown for dinner when I hear another roar of guns and although it is pitch black and nearly midnight Jane Boleyn comes smiling to tell me that there are hundreds of people in the great hall come to welcome me to Canterbury.

‘Many gentlemen?’ I ask her in my stilted English.

She smiles at once, she knows that I am dreading a long line of introductions.

‘They just want to see you,’ she says clearly, pointing to her eyes. ‘You just have to wave.’ She shows me a wave and I giggle at the masque that we play to each other while I learn her language.

I point to the window. ‘Good land,’ I say.

She nods. ‘Abbey land, God’s land.’

‘Now the king’s?’

She has a wry smile. ‘The king is now head of the church, you understand? All the wealth –’ she hesitates ‘– the spiritual wealth of the church is now his.’

‘And the people are glad?’ I ask. I am so frustrated by being unable to speak fluently. ‘The bad priests are gone?’

She glances towards the door as if she would be sure that we cannot be overheard. ‘The people are not glad,’ she says. ‘The people loved the shrines and the saints, they don’t know why the candles are being taken away. They don’t know why they cannot pray for help. But you should not speak of this to anyone but me. It is the king’s will that the church should be destroyed.’

I nod. ‘He is a Protestant?’ I ask.

Her quick smile makes her eyes sparkle. ‘Oh, no!’ she says. ‘He is whatever he wishes to be. He destroyed the church so that he could marry my sister-in-law; she believed in a reformed church and the king believed with her. Then he destroyed her. He has turned the church almost back to being Catholic, the Mass is almost completely restored – but he will never give back the wealth. Who knows what he will do next? What will he believe next?’

I understand only a little of this so I turn away from her and look out of the window at the driving rain and the pitch darkness. The thought of a king who can determine not only what life his people lead but even the nature of the God they worship makes me shiver. This is a king who has thrown down the shrine of one of the greatest saints in Christendom, this is a king who has turned the great monasteries of his country into private houses. My brother was quite wrong to command me to lead this king into right-thinking. This is a king who will have his own way, and I daresay nobody can stop or turn him.

‘We should go to dinner,’ Jane Boleyn says gently to me. ‘Do not speak of these things to anyone.’

‘Yes,’ I say, and with her just one pace behind me I open my privy chamber door to the crowds of people waiting for me in my presence chamber and I face the sea of unknown smiling faces once more.

I am so delighted to be out of the rain and out of the darkness that I take a large glass of wine and eat heartily at dinner, even though I sit alone under a canopy and I am served by men who kneel to offer dishes to me. There are hundreds of people dining in the hall and hundreds more who peer in at the windows and doorways to see me as if I were some strange animal.

I will grow accustomed to this, I know that I have to; and I will. There is no point being a Queen of England and being embarrassed by servants. This stolen abbey is not even one of the great palaces of the land and yet I have never seen a place so wealthy with gildings and paintings and tapestries. I ask the archbishop if this is his own palace and he smiles and says his own house is nearby. This is a country of such great riches that it is almost unimaginable.

I do not get to my bed till the early hours of the morning and then we rise again, early, to travel on. But however early we start it still takes us forever to leave as every day there are more people coming with us. The archbishop and all his train, truly hundreds of them, are now travelling with me, and this day I am joined by more great lords who escort me into Rochester. The people line the streets to greet me and everywhere I go I smile and wave.

I wish I could remember everyone’s name, but every time we stop anywhere some richly dressed man comes up and bows before me, and Lady Lisle, or Lady Southampton, or one of the other ladies whispers something in my ear, and I smile and extend my hand, and try to fix a fresh set of names into my mind. And they all look the same anyway: all dressed in rich velvet and wearing gold chains and with pearls or jewels in their hats. And there are dozens of them, hundreds of them, half of England has come to pay their compliments to me, and I cannot tell one man from another any more.

We dine in a great hall with much ceremony and Lady Browne, who is to be in charge of my maids in waiting, is presented to me. She introduces my maids by name and I smile at the unending line of Katherines and Marys and Elizabeths and Annes and Bessies and Madges, all of them pert and pretty under tiny hoods that show their hair in a way that my brother would blame as immodest, all of them dainty in little slippers, and all of them stare at me as if I were a wild white falcon landed in a chicken coop. Lady Browne especially stares me out of countenance, and I beckon Lotte and ask her to tell Lady Browne in English that I hope she will advise me about my dress and English fashions when we get to London. When she gives her my message, Lady Browne flushes and turns away and does not stare any more, and I fear that she was indeed thinking that my dress is very odd and that I am ugly.

Jane Boleyn, Rochester, December 1539

‘Advise her about her dress!’ Lady Browne hisses at me, as if it is my fault that the new Queen of England looks so outlandish. ‘Jane Boleyn, tell me! Could she not have changed her dress in Calais?’

‘Who could have advised her?’ I ask reasonably. ‘All her ladies dress the same, after all.’

‘Lord Lisle could have advised her. He could have warned her that she couldn’t come to England looking like a friar in fustian. How can I be expected to keep her maids in order when they are laughing their heads off at her? I nearly had to smack Katherine Howard. That child has been one day in royal service and already she is mimicking the queen’s walk and, what is worse, she has her to the life.’

‘Maids are always naughty. You will command them.’

‘There is no time for dressmakers until she gets to London. She will have to go on as she has begun, even if she looks like a parcel. What is she doing now?’

‘She is resting,’ I say guardedly. ‘I thought I would leave her in peace for a moment.’

‘She is to be Queen of England,’ her ladyship snaps. ‘That is not a peaceful life for any woman.’

I say nothing.

‘Should we say anything to the king? Shall I speak to my husband?’ Lady Browne asks me, her voice very low. ‘Should we not tell Secretary Cromwell that we have … reservations? Will you say anything to the duke?’

I think quickly. I swear that I am not going to be the first to speak against this queen. ‘Perhaps you should speak to Sir Anthony,’ I say. ‘Privately, as his wife.’

‘Shall I tell him that we are agreed? Surely my lord Southampton realises that she is not fit to be queen. She is so graceless! And all but mute!’

‘I have no opinion, myself,’ I say rapidly.

She laughs at once. ‘Oh, Jane Boleyn, you always have an opinion; not much ever escapes you.’

‘Perhaps. But if the king has chosen her because she brings with her the Protestant alliance, if my lord Cromwell has chosen her because it makes us safe against Spain and France, then perhaps the fact that her hood is the size of a house will not matter to him. She can always change her hood. And I would not want to be the one to suggest to the king that the woman he has solemnly and unbreakably betrothed is not fit to be queen.’

That stops her in her tracks. ‘You think I would be mistaken to criticise her?’

I think of the white-faced girl who peeped out of the closet in Calais, too shy and too frightened to sit in a room with her own court, and I find that I want to defend her against this unkindness. ‘Well, I have no criticism to make of her,’ I say. ‘I am her lady in waiting. I may advise her as to her gowns or her hair if she asks me; but I would not have one word to say against her.’

‘Or at any rate, not yet,’ Lady Browne amends coldly. ‘Until you see an advantage for yourself.’

I let it pass for just as I am about to answer the door opens and the guard announces: ‘Mistress Catherine Carey, the queen’s maid in waiting.’

It is her. My niece. I have to face the child at last. I find a smile and I hold out my hands to her. ‘Little Catherine!’ I exclaim. ‘How you have grown!’

She takes my hands but she does not turn up her face to kiss my cheek. She looks at me quietly, as if she is taking the measure of me. The last time I saw her was when she stood behind her Aunt Anne the queen on the scaffold, and held her cloak as the queen put her head on the block. The last time she saw me was outside the courtroom when they called my name to go in to give evidence. I remember how she looked at me then: curiously. She looked at me so curiously, as if she had never seen such a woman before.

‘Are you cold? How was your journey? Will you have some wine?’ I am drawing her to the fire and she comes, but she is not eager. ‘This is Lady Browne,’ I say. Her curtsey is good, she is graceful. She has been well taught.

‘And how is your mother? And your father?’

‘They are well.’ Her voice is clear with just a hint of the country in her speech. ‘My mother sent you a letter.’

She brings it out of her pocket and hands it to me. I take it over to the light of the large square candle that we use in the royal household and break the seal.

Jane,

So starts Mary Boleyn, without a word of a title as if I did not hold the very name of her house in my name, as if I were not Lady Rochford while she lives at Rochford Hall. As if she did not have my inheritance and my house while I have hers, which is nothing.

Long ago I chose the love of my husband over the vanity and danger of the court, and we perhaps would all have been happier if you and my sister had done the same – God have mercy on her soul. I have no desire to return to court but I wish you and the new Queen Anne better fortune than before, and I hope that your ambitions bring you the happiness you seek, and not what some might think you deserve.

My uncle has commanded the attendance of my daughter Catherine at court and in obedience to him, she will arrive for the New Year. It is my instruction to her that she obeys only the king and her uncle, that she is guided only by my advice and her own good conscience. I have told her that, at the end, you were no friend to my sister nor my brother and advised her to treat you with the respect you deserve.

Mary Stafford

I am shaking after I have read this note and I re-read it again as if it might be different the second time. The respect I deserve? The respect I deserve? What did I do but lie and deceive to save the two of them till the very last moment, and then what did I do but protect the family from the disaster that they brought down on us? What could I do more? What should I have done differently? I obeyed the duke my uncle as I was bound to do, I did as he commanded me, and my deserts are these: that I am his faithful kinswoman and honoured as such.

Who is she to call me a woman who might have been a good wife? I loved my husband with every inch of my soul and being and I would have been everything to him if it were not for her and her sister and the net they made for him that he could not break, and that I could not break for him. Would he not be alive today if he had not gone down with his sister’s disgrace? Would he not be my husband and the father of our son today, if he had not been named with Anne and beheaded with Anne? And what did Mary do to save him? What did she ever do but suit herself?

I could scream with sheer rage and despair that she should set these thoughts running again in my head. That she should doubt my love of George, that she should reproach me! I am lost for words at the malice of her letter, at the veiled accusation. What else could I have done? I want to shout into her face. You were there, you were hardly the saviour of George and Anne. What else could any of us have done?

But she was always like this, she and her sister; they always had a way to make me feel that they saw better, understood better, considered better. From the moment that I married George I was aware that his sisters were supposed to be finer young women than I: one the king’s lover and then the other. One, in the end, the king’s wife and Queen of England. They were born for greatness! The Boleyn Sisters! And I was only ever a sister-in-law. Well, so be it. I have not got where I am today, I have not borne witness and sworn oaths to be reprimanded by a woman who ran away at the first sign of danger and married a man to hide in the country and pray Protestant prayers that good times would come.

Catherine, her daughter, looks at me curiously. ‘Did she show you this?’ I ask, my voice shaking. Lady Browne looks at me, avidly inquisitive.

‘No,’ Catherine says.

I put it into the fire, as if it were evidence against me. The three of us watch it burn to grey ash. ‘I will reply later,’ I say. ‘It was not at all important. For now, I will go and see that they have prepared your room.’

It is an excuse to get away from the two of them and the soft ash from the notepaper in the fire. I go quickly out and I call the maids and scold them for inattention, and then I go quietly to my own room and lean my hot forehead against the cool, thick glass. I shall ignore this slander, I shall ignore this insult, I shall ignore this enmity. Whatever its cause. I live in the heart of the court. I serve my king and my family. In time they shall all acknowledge me as the finest of the family, the Boleyn girl who served king and family to the end, never shrinking, never faltering, even if the king has grown fat and dangerous, and the family are all dead but me.

Katherine, Rochester, 31 December 1539

Now let me see, what do I have? What do I have now I am practically a grown-up lady at court?

I have three new gowns, which is good, but it is hardly a vast wardrobe for a girl who expects to be much observed and much commented on. I have three new hoods to match, which are very pretty but none of them are trimmed with anything more than gold lace and I see that many of the ladies of court have pearls and even precious stones on their hoods. I have some good gloves and a new cloak and a muff and a couple of lace collars, but I cannot say that I am overly indulged in my choice or quantity of clothes. And what is the point of being at court if I do not have a great deal of pretty things to wear?

For all my great hopes of court life, it is not proving to be very merry. We came down by boat from Gravesend in the worst weather I have ever seen, driving rain and terrible wind so my hood was all blown about and my hair a mess, and my new velvet cape got wet and I am sure it will be water-marked. The queen-to-be greeted us with a face as blank as a fish. They may say she is tired but she seems just amazed by everything, like some peasant come to town for the first time, she stares astounded at the commonest of sights. When people cheer for her she smiles and waves like a child at a travelling fair, but when she is called upon to greet a lord come to her court, she forever looks around for one of her Cleves companions and mutters to them in their stupid language, puts out her hand as if she was serving a joint of meat and says nothing in English at all.

When I was presented to her she barely looked at me, she looked at all of us new girls as if she did not know what we were doing in her chamber, nor what she should do with us. I thought she might at least ask for music and I have a song note-perfect and ready to sing but, absurdly, she said that she must pray and she went off and shut herself in her closet. My cousin Jane Boleyn says that she does that when she wants to be alone, and that it is a sign not of piety, but of her shyness, and that we must be kind to her and merry with her and she will soon learn our language and be less simple.

I can’t see it myself. She has a shift under her gown that comes up nearly to her chin. She has a hood that must be a ton in weight crammed on her head, she is broad in the shoulders and she could be any size in the hips under that pudding-bowl of a gown. Lord Southampton seems very taken with her, but perhaps he is just relieved that the journey will soon be over and his job done. The English ambassadors who were at Cleves with her chat to her in her language and then she is all smiles and chatters back at them like a quacking duckling. Lady Lisle seems to like her. Jane Boleyn is often at her side. But I am afraid that this is not going to be a very merry court for me, and what is the point of a court at all if it is not merry with dancing and flirtation? Indeed, what is the point of anyone being a young queen at all if she is not going to be merry and vain and silly?

Jane Boleyn, Rochester, 31 December 1539

There is to be a bull-baiting after dinner and Lady Anne is shown to the window that overlooks the courtyard so that she can have the best view. As soon as she appears at the window a cheer goes up from the men in the yard below, even though they are bringing out the dogs and it is rare for common men to break off from gambling at such a moment. She smiles and waves to them. She is always easy with the ordinary people, and they like her for it. Everywhere we have been on the road she has a smile for the people who come out to see her, and she will blow a kiss to little children who throw posies of flowers in her litter. Everyone is surprised at this. Not since Katherine of Aragon have we had a queen who is so smiling and pleasant to the common people, and not since Aragon has England relished the novelty of a foreign princess. No doubt this one will learn to be easy with the court too, in time.

I stand beside her on one side and one of her German friends is on the other so that he can tell her what is being said. Lord Lisle is there, of course, and Archbishop Cranmer. He is devoting himself to being pleasing, of course. She may be Cromwell’s candidate, and thus an asset for his rival; but his worst fear must have been that the king would bring in a Papist princess, and this reforming archbishop would see his church turned back to the old ways once more.

Some of the court are at the windows to see the baiting, some are gossiping quietly at the back of the room. I cannot hear exactly what is being said, but I think there are more than Lady Browne who think that the Lady Anne is not well-suited to the great position that she has been called on to fill. They judge her harshly for her shyness and her lack of speech. They blame her for her clothes and they laugh at her for not being able to dance or sing or play a lute. This is a cruel court, devoted to frivolity, and she is a girl easy to use as a butt for sarcasm. If this goes on, what will happen? She and the king are all but married. Nothing can stop the wedding. He can hardly send her home in disgrace, can he? For the crime of wearing a heavy hood? Not even the king can do that, surely? Not even this king can do it? It would bring Cromwell’s treaty down about his ears, it would bring down Cromwell himself, it would leave England friendless facing France and Spain without any Protestant alliance at our back. The king will never risk it, I am sure. But I cannot imagine what will happen.

Down in the yard below they are getting ready to release the bull, his handler unclips the rope from the ring in his nose, skips out of the way, vaults over the boards and the men who have been sitting on the wooden benches rise to their feet and start to shout bets. The bull is a great animal with heavy shoulders and a thick, ugly head. He turns this way and that, spotting the dogs from one little eye and then the other. The dogs are none too eager to be the first to run in, they are afraid of him in his power and his strength.

I feel a little breathless. I have not seen a bull-baiting since I was last at court, I had forgotten what a savage excitement it is to see the yapping dogs and the great beast that they will pull down. It is rare to see a bull as big as this one, his muzzle scarred from earlier fights, his horns barely blunted. The dogs hang back and bark, sharp, persistent barks with the thrilling sound of fear behind them. He turns from one to another, threatening them with the sweep of his horns, and they fall back into a circle around him.

One rushes in, and at once the bull spins, you would not think such a great animal could move so quickly, his head ploughs low and there is a scream like a human cry from the dog as the horns buffet his body, his bones are broken for sure. He is down and cannot crawl away, he is yelping like a baby, the bull stands over him, his head down, and grinds the side of his great horn into the screaming dog.

I find I am crying out, though whether for the dog or for the bull I couldn’t say. There is blood on the cobbles but the bull’s attack has left him unguarded to the other dogs, and another darts in and takes a bite at his ear. He turns, but at once another fastens on his throat and hangs there for a moment, his white teeth bared and gleaming in the torchlight, while the bull bellows for the first time and the roar of it makes all the maids scream and me among them, and everyone is now crowding to the windows to see as the bull rakes his head round and the dogs fall back and one of them howls with rage.

I find I am trembling, crying out for the dogs to go on! Go on! I want to see more, I want to see all of it, and Lady Anne beside me is laughing, she is excited too, she points to the bull where his ear is bleeding, and I nod and say, ‘He will be so angry! He will kill them for sure!’ And then suddenly, a bulky man I don’t know, a stranger smelling of sweat and wine and horses, pushes in front of us, into the window bay where we are standing, pushes rudely by me, and says to the Lady Anne, ‘I bring you greetings from the King of England,’ and he kisses her, full on the mouth.

At once I turn to shout for the guards. This is an old man of nearly fifty, a fat man, old enough to be her father. She thinks at once that he is some drunk fool who has managed to push his way into her chamber. She has greeted a hundred men, a thousand men, with a smile and an extended hand and now this man, wearing a marbled cape and a hood pulled over his head, comes up to her and pushes his face into hers and puts his slobbery mouth on hers.

Then I bite off my shout of alarm, I see his height, and I see the men who have come in with him in matching capes, and I know him at once for the king. At the same moment, like a miracle, at once he does not seem old and fat and distasteful. As soon as I know he is the king I see the prince that I have always seen, the one they called the handsomest prince in Christendom, the one that I was in love with myself. This is Henry, King of England, one of the most powerful men in the entire world, the dancer, the musician, the sportsman, the courtly knight, the lover. This is the idol of the English court, as big as the bull in the yard below us, as dangerous as a bull when wounded, as likely to turn on any challenger and kill.

I don’t curtsey because he is in disguise. I learned from Katherine of Aragon herself that one should never see through his disguises, he loves to unmask and wait for everyone to exclaim that they had no idea who the handsome stranger was, that they admired him for himself, without knowing that he was our wonderful young king.

And so, because I cannot warn Lady Anne, the scene in our gallery becomes a baiting to equal what is going on, bloodily, in the courtyard below us. She pushes him away, two firm hands against his fat chest, and her face, sometimes so dull and stolid, is burning with colour. She is a modest woman, an untouched girl, and she is horrified that this man should come and insult her. She rubs the back of her hand over her face to erase the taste of his lips. Then, terribly, she turns her head and spits his saliva from her mouth. She says something in German that needs no translation, clearly it is a curse against this commoner who has presumed to touch her, to breathe his wine-scented breath into her face.

He stumbles back, he, the great king, almost falls back before her contempt. Never in his life has a woman pushed him away, never in his life has he ever seen any expression in any woman’s face but desire and welcome. He is stunned. In her flushed face and bright, offended gaze he sees the first honest opinion of himself that he has ever known. In a terrible, blinding flash he sees himself as he really is: an old man, long past his prime, no longer handsome, no longer desirable, a man that a young woman would push roughly away from her because she could not stand his smell, because she could not bear his touch.

He reels back as if he has taken a mortal blow to the face, to his heart. I have never seen him like this before. I can almost see the thoughts running behind his stunned, flabby face. The sudden realisation that he is not handsome, the realisation that he is not desirable, the terrible realisation that he is old and ill and one day he will die. He is no longer the handsomest prince in Christendom, he is a foolish old man who thought that he could put on a cape and a hood and ride out to meet a girl of twenty-four, and she would admire the handsome stranger, and fall in love with the king.

He is shocked to his soul, and now he looks foolish and confused like a muddled grandfather. Lady Anne is magnificent, she is drawn up to her full height and she is angry, she is powerful, she is standing on her dignity and she shoots a look at him which dismisses him from her court as a man that no-one would want to know. ‘Leave me,’ she says in heavy-accented English, and she turns her shoulder on him as if she would push him away again.

She looks around the room for a guard to arrest this intruder, and she notices for the first time that no-one is springing to save her, we are all appalled, no-one knows what they can say or do to recover this moment: Lady Anne outraged, the king humbled in his own eyes, thrown down before us all. The truth of the king’s age and decay is suddenly, painfully, unforgiveably apparent. Lord Southampton steps forwards but is lost for words; Lady Lisle looks at me and I see my shock mirrored in her face. It is a moment of such intense embarrassment that all of us – we skilled flatterers, courtiers, liars – are lost for words. The world we have been building for thirty years, around our prince who is ageless, eternally handsome, irresistibly desirable, has been shattered about our ears – and by a woman we none of us respect.

He turns wordlessly, he almost stumbles as he goes, his stinking leg giving way beneath him, and Katherine Howard, that clever, clever little girl, catches her breath in a gasp of absolute admiration and says to him: ‘Ooh! Forgive me, sir! But I am new to court myself, a stranger like you. May I ask – who are you? What is your name?’

Katherine, Rochester, 31 December 1539

I am the only person to see him come in. I don’t like bull-baiting, or bears, or cockfighting, or anything like that, I think it’s just downright nasty – and so I am standing a little back from the windows. And I am looking round, actually, I am looking at a young man that I had seen earlier, such a handsome young man with a cheeky smile, when I see the six of them come in, old men, they must all be thirty at the least, and the big old king at the front, and they are all wearing the same sort of cape, like a masquing costume, so I guess at once that it is him, and that he has come in disguise like a knight errant, silly old fool, and that he will greet her and she will pretend not to know him, and then there will be dancing. Really, I am delighted to see him because this makes it a certainty that there will be dancing and so I am wondering how I can encourage the handsome young man to be near me in the dance.

When he kisses her it all goes terribly wrong. I can see at once that she has no idea who he is, someone should have warned her. She thinks he is just some drunk old man who has staggered in to kiss her for a wager, and of course she is shocked, and of course quite repelled, because when he is in a cheap cloak and not surrounded by the greatest court in the world he does not look at all like a king. In truth, when he is in a cheap cloak and with his companions, also dressed poorly, he looks like some common merchant, with a waddling walk and a red nose, who likes a glass of wine, and hopes to go to court and see his betters. He looks like the sort of man my uncle would not acknowledge if he called out in the street. A fat old man, a vulgar old man, like a drunk sheep farmer on market day. His face is terribly bloated, like a great round dish of dripping, his hair is thinning and grey, he is monstrously fat, and he has an old injury in his leg that makes him so lame that he rolls in his walk like a sailor. Without his crown he is not handsome, he looks like anybody’s fat old grandfather.

He falls back, she stands on her dignity, rubbing her mouth to take the smell of his breath away, and then – it is so awful I could almost scream with shock – she turns her head and spits out the taste of him. ‘Leave me,’ she says and turns her back on him.

There is utter, dreadful silence, nobody says a word, and suddenly I know, as if my own cousin Anne Boleyn is at my side telling me, what I should do. I am not even thinking of the dancing and the young man, for once I am not even thinking of myself, and that almost never happens. I just think, in a flash, that if I pretend not to know him, then he can go on not knowing himself, and the whole sorry masque of this silly old man and his gross vanity will not tumble about our ears. I just feel sorry for him, to tell the truth. I just think that I can spare him this awful embarrassment of bouncing up to a woman and having her slap him down like a smelly old hound. If anyone else had said anything then I would have stayed silent. But nobody says anything and the silence goes on and on, unbearably, and he stumbles back, he almost falls back into me, and his face is all crumpled and confused and I am so sorry for him, poor humbled old fool, that I say, I coo: ‘Ooh! Forgive me, sir! But I am new to court myself, a stranger like you. May I ask – who are you?’

Jane Boleyn, Rochester, 31 December 1539

Lady Browne is ordering the maids to their beds in a bellow as if she were a Yeoman of the Guard. They are over-excited and Katherine Howard among them is the centre of it all, as wild as any of them, a true Queen of the May. How she spoke to the king, how she peeped up at him from under her eyelashes, how she begged him, as a handsome stranger, new-come to court, to ask the Lady Anne for dancing, is being mimicked and re-enacted till they are drunk with their own laughter.

Lady Browne is not laughing, her face is like thunder, so I hustle the girls into bed and tell them that they are all very foolish and that they would do better to copy their lady, the Lady Anne, and show proper dignity, than mimic Katherine Howard’s free and forward ways. They slip into their beds two by two like pretty angels and we blow out the candle and leave them in the darkness and lock the door. We have hardly turned away before we hear them whispering, but no power on earth can make girls behave well; and we do not even try.

‘Are you troubled, Lady Browne?’ I ask considerately.

She hesitates, she is longing to confide in someone, and I am here at her side, and known to be discreet.

‘This is a bad business,’ she says heavily. ‘Oh, it all passed off pleasantly enough in the end, with the dancing and the singing and Lady Anne recovered quickly enough as soon as you had explained to her; but this is a bad, bad business.’

‘The king?’ I suggest.

She nods and folds her lips over as if she would stop herself saying more.

‘I am weary,’ I say. ‘Shall we take a glass of warm ale together before we go to our beds? Sir Anthony is staying here tonight, is he not?’

‘God knows he won’t join me in my rooms for hours,’ she says unguardedly. ‘I doubt if any of the king’s circle will sleep tonight.’

‘Oh?’ I say. I lead the way into the presence chamber. The other ladies have gone to bed, the fire is burning low, but there is a jug of ale set at the fireside and half a dozen tankards. I pour us both a drink. ‘Trouble?’

She sits in her chair and leans forwards to whisper. ‘My lord husband tells me that the king swears that he will not marry her.’

‘No!’

‘He does. He does. He swears it. He says that he cannot like her.’

She takes a long draw on the ale and looks at me over the top of the mug.

‘Lady Browne, you must have this wrong …’

‘I have it from my husband this very night. The king seized him by the collar, almost by the throat, as soon as we retired, and said that the moment he saw Lady Anne, he had been struck with consternation, and that he saw nothing in her that he had been told.’

‘He said that?’

‘Those very words.’

‘But he seemed so happy as we left?’

‘He was as truly happy just as Katherine Howard was truly ignorant of his identity. He is as much a happy bridegroom as she is an innocent child. We are all actors here, but the king will not play the part of eager bridegroom.’

‘He has to, they are betrothed and the contract signed.’

‘He does not like her, he says. He cannot like her, he says, and he is blaming the men who made this marriage for him.’

I have to get this news to the duke, he has to be warned before the king gets back to London.

‘Blaming the men who made the marriage?’

‘And those who brought her to him. He is furious.’

‘He will blame Thomas Cromwell,’ I predict quietly.

‘Indeed.’

‘But what of the Lady Anne? Surely, he cannot refuse her?’

‘There is some talk of an impediment,’ she says. ‘And that is why Sir Anthony and none of the others will have any sleep tonight. The Cleves lords should have brought a copy of an agreement to say that some old previous contract to marry has been withdrawn. Since they don’t have it, perhaps there may be grounds to argue that the marriage cannot go ahead, it is not valid.’

‘Not again,’ I say, unguarded for a moment. ‘Not the same objection that he put against Queen Katherine! We will all look like fools!’

She nods. ‘Yes, the same. But better for her that an impediment is declared now and she is sent safely home, than she stays and marries an enemy. You know the king, he will never forgive her for spitting out his kiss.’

I say nothing. These are dangerous speculations.

‘Her brother must be a fool,’ I say. ‘She has come a long way if he has not secured her safety.’

‘I would not be in her shoes tonight,’ Lady Browne says. ‘You know I never thought she would please the king, and I told my husband so. But he knew best, the alliance with Cleves is vital, he tells me, we have to be protected from France and Spain, we have to be protected against the Papist powers. There are Papists who would march against us from every corner of Europe, there are Papists who would kill the king in his own bed, here in England. We have to strengthen the reformers. Her brother is a leader of the Protestant dukes and princes, that is where our future lies. I say: “Yes, my lord; but the king will not like her. Mark my words: he will not like her.” And then the king comes in, all ready for courtship, and she pushes him away from her as if he was a drunk tradesman.’

‘He did not look kingly at that moment.’ I will not say more than this cautious judgement.

‘He was not at his best,’ she says, as careful as I. Between us is the unsayable fact that our handsome prince has grown into a gross, ugly man, an old, ugly man; and for the first time we have all seen it.

‘I must go to my bed,’ she says, putting down her cup. She cannot bear even to think of the decay of the prince we have adored.

‘I too.’

I let her go to her room and I wait till I hear her door close, then I quietly go to the great hall where, drinking heavily, and clearly nearly dead drunk, is a man in Howard livery. I crook my finger at him and he rises up quietly and leaves the others.

‘Go to my lord duke,’ I say to him quietly, my mouth to his ear. ‘Go at once and get to him before he sees the king.’

He nods, he understands at once. ‘Tell him, and tell him only, that the king does not like the Lady Anne, that he will try to declare that the marriage contract is invalid, and that he is blaming those who made this marriage and will blame anyone who insists on it.’

The man nods again. I think hard, in case there is anything I should add.

‘That’s all.’ I need not remind one of the most skilled and unscrupulous men in England that our rival Thomas Cromwell was the architect and inspiration for this match. That this is our great chance to bring down Cromwell, as we brought down Wolsey before him. That if Cromwell is down then the king will need an advisor and who better than his commander in chief? Norfolk.

‘Go at once, and get to the duke before he sees the king,’ I say again. ‘Our lord must not meet the king without warning.’

The man bows, he leaves the room at once, without saying goodbye to his drinking companions. By his swift stride he is clearly completely sober.

I go to my own room. My bedfellow for tonight, one of the other ladies in waiting, is already asleep, her arm outflung to my side of the bed. Gently, I lift it and slide in between the warm sheets. I don’t sleep at once, I lie in the silence and listen to her breathing beside me. I am thinking about the poor young woman Lady Anne and the innocence of her face and the directness of her gaze. I am wondering if Lady Browne could possibly be right and this young woman could be in danger of her life simply by being the wife that the king does not want.

Surely not. Lady Browne is exaggerating for certain. This young woman is the daughter of a German duke, she has a powerful brother who will protect her. The king needs her alliance. But then I remember that this brother let her come to England without the one piece of paper which would secure her marriage, and I wonder that he should be so careless with her, to send her such a long way into such a bear pit with no protector.

Anne, on the road to Dartford, 1 January, 1540

Nothing could be worse, I feel such a fool. I am so glad to be travelling today, seated uncomfortably in the rolling litter, but at least alone. At least I don’t have to face any sympathetic, secretly laughing faces, all buzzing with the disaster of my first meeting with the king.

But truly, how should I be blamed? He has a portrait of me, Hans Holbein himself humbled me to the ground with his unsmiling stare, so that the king had my portrait to scrutinise and criticise and study, he has a very good idea of who I am. But I have no picture of him except the picture in my mind that everyone has: of the young prince who came to his throne a golden youth of eighteen, the handsomest prince in the world. I knew well enough that he is all but fifty now. I knew that I was not marrying a handsome boy, not even a handsome prince. I knew I was marrying a king in his prime, even an ageing man. But I did not know what he was like. I had seen no new portrait of him to consider. And I was not expecting … that.

Not that he is so bad, perhaps. I can see the man he once was. He has broad shoulders, handsome in a man at any age. He still rides, they tell me, he still hunts except when some wound in his leg is troubling him, he is still active. He runs his country himself, he has not handed over power to more vigorous advisors, he has all his wits about him, as far as one can tell. But he has small, piggy eyes and a small, spoiled mouth, in a great ball of a moon face swelling with fat. His teeth must be very bad, for his breath is very foul. When he grabbed me and kissed me the stink of him was truly awful. When he fell back from me he looked like a spoiled child, ready to cry. But, I must be fair, that was a bad moment for both of us. I daresay, as I thrust him away from me, that I did not appear at my best either.

I wish to God I had not spat.

This is a bad beginning. A bad and undignified beginning. Really, he should not have come on me unprepared and without warning. All very well for them to tell me now that he loves disguising and masquing and pretending to be an ordinary man so that people can discover him with delight. They never told me this before. On the contrary, every day it has been dinned into my head that the English court is formal, that things must be done in a certain way, than I have to learn orders of precedence, that I must never be faulted by calling a junior member of a family to my side before a senior member, that these things matter to the English more than life itself. Every day before I left Cleves, my mother reminded me that the Queen of England must be above reproach, must be a woman of utter royal dignity and coldness, must never be familiar, must never be light, must never be overly-friendly. Every day she told me that the life of a Queen of England depends on her unblemished reputation. She threatened me with the same fate as Anne Boleyn if I was loose and warm and amorous like her.

So why should I ever dream that some fat old drunk would come up and kiss me? How would I ever dream that I am supposed to let an ugly old man kiss me without introduction or warning?

Still, I wish to God that I had not spat out the foul taste of him.

Anyway, perhaps it is not so bad. This morning he has sent me a present, a gift of rich sables, very expensive and very high quality. Little Katherine Howard, who is so sweet that she mistook the king for a stranger and greeted him kindly, has had a brooch of gold from him. Sir Anthony Browne brought the gifts this morning with a pretty speech, and told me that the king has gone ahead to prepare for our official meeting, which will happen at a place called Blackheath, outside the City of London. My ladies say that there will be no surprises between now and then, so I need not be on my guard. They say that this disguising is a favourite game of the king’s and once we are married I must be prepared for him to come wearing a false beard or a big hat and ask me to dance, and we will all pretend not to know him. I smile and say how charming, though in truth I am thinking: how odd, and how childlike, and really, how very vain of him, how foolishly vain to hope that people will fall in love with him on sight as a common man, when he looks as he does now. Perhaps when he was young and handsome he could go about in disguise and people would welcome him for his good looks and charm; but surely, for many years now, many years, people must have only pretended to admire him? But I don’t speak my thoughts. It is better that I say nothing now, having spoiled the game once already.

The girl who saved the day by greeting him so politely, little Katherine Howard, is one of my new maids in waiting. I call her to me in the bustle of departing this morning, and I thank her, as best I can manage in English, for her help.

She dips a little curtsey, and speaks to me in a rattle of English.

‘She says that she is delighted to serve you,’ my translator, Lotte, tells me. ‘And that she has not been to court before, so she did not recognise the king either.’

‘Why then did she speak to a stranger who had come without invitation?’ I ask, puzzled. ‘Surely, she should have ignored him? Such a rude man, pushing his way in?’

Lotte turns this into English, and I see the girl look at me as if there is more that divides us than language, as if we are on different worlds, as if I come from the snows and fly on white wings.

‘Was?’ I ask in German. I spread out my hands to her and raise my eyebrows. ‘What?’

She steps a little closer, she whispers in Lotte’s ear without ever taking her eyes from my face. She is such a pretty little thing, like a doll, and so earnest, that I cannot help smiling.

Lotte turns to me, she is near to laughing. ‘She says that of course she knew it was the king. Who else would be able to get into the chamber past the guards? Who else is so tall and fat? But the game of the court is to pretend not to know him, and to address him only because he is such a handsome stranger. She says she may be only fourteen, and her grandmother says she is a dolt; but already she knows that every man in England loves to be admired, indeed, the older they are the vainer they get, and surely, men are not so different in Cleves?’

I laugh at her, and at myself. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Tell her that men are not so different in Cleves but that this woman of Cleves is clearly a fool and I shall be guided by her in future even if she is only fourteen, whatever her grandmother calls her.’

Katherine, Dartford, 2 January 1540

Utter terror! Oh, God! Horror beyond my worst fears! I shall die of this, I shall. My uncle has come here, all the way from Greenwich, specially to see me, and summoned me to him. What on God’s earth can he want with me? I am certain that my conversation with the king has come to his ears and he thinks the worst of it and will send me home to my grandmother for unmaidenly behaviour. I shall die. If he sends me to Lambeth I shall die of the humiliation. But if he sends me back to Horsham I shall be glad to die of boredom. I shall fling myself into the whatever it is called, the river there – the River Horsh, the River Sham – the duckpond if needs be, and drown, and they will be sorry when I am drowned and lost to all of them.

It must have been like this for my cousin Queen Anne when she knew she was to appear before him accused of adultery and knew he would not take her side. She must have been scared out of her wits, sick with terror, but I swear no worse than I am now. I could die of terror. I may just die of terror before I even see him.

I am to see him in my Lady Rochford’s own room, the disgrace is obviously so bad that it has to be kept among us Howards, and when I go in, she is in the window-seat, so I suppose it is her who has told him all about it. When she smiles at me I scowl at her for a tale-bearing old tabby and I make a horrid face at her to let her know who I thank for my doom.

‘Lord uncle, I beg of you not to send me to Horsham,’ I say, the moment I am through the door.

He looks at me with a scowl. ‘And good day to you, my niece,’ he says icily.

I drop into a curtsey, I could almost fall to my knees. ‘Please, my lord, don’t send me back to Lambeth either,’ I say. ‘I beg of you. The Lady Anne is not displeased with me, she laughed when I told her …’ I break off. I realise, too late, that to tell my uncle that I have told the king’s betrothed wife that although he is fat and old he is also unspeakably vain, is perhaps not the cleverest thing to say. ‘I didn’t tell her anything,’ I correct myself. ‘But she is pleased with me and she says she will take my advice even though my grandmother thinks I am a dolt.’

His sardonic bark of laughter warns me that he agrees with my grandmother’s verdict.

‘Well, not my advice, exactly, sir; but she is pleased with me, and so is the king, for he sent me a gold brooch. Oh, please, uncle, if you let me stay I will never speak out again, I won’t even breathe! Please, I beg of you. I am utterly innocent of everything!’

He laughs again.

‘I am,’ I say. ‘Please, uncle, don’t turn your face from me, please trust me. I shall be a good girl, I shall make you proud of me, I shall try to be a perfect …’

‘Oh, hush, I am pleased with you,’ he says.

‘I will do anything …’

‘I said, I am pleased with you.’

I look up. ‘You are?’

‘You seem to have behaved delightfully. The king danced with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And talked with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And seemed much taken with you?’

I have to think for a minute. I would not have called him exactly ‘taken’. He was not like a young man whose eyes drift down from my face to peek at my breasts while he is talking to me, or who blushes when I smile at him. And besides, the king almost fell back into me when Lady Anne rebuffed him. He was still shocked. He would have spoken to anyone to hide his hurt and embarrassment.

‘He did talk to me,’ I repeat helplessly.

‘I am very pleased that he honoured you with his attention,’ my uncle says. He is speaking slowly as if he is a schoolmaster, and I should be understanding something.

‘Oh.’

‘Very pleased.’

I glance across at Lady Rochford to see if this is making any sense for her. She gives me a slight smile and a nod.

‘He sent me a brooch,’ I remind him.

He looks at me sharply. ‘Valuable?’

I make a little face. ‘Nothing to the sables that he sent Lady Anne.’

‘I should hope not. But it was of gold?’

‘Yes, and pretty.’

He turns to Lady Rochford. ‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ she says. They exchange a small smile, as if they understand each other well.

‘Should His Majesty honour you by speaking with you again, you will endeavour to be very charming and pleasing.’

‘Yes, my lord uncle.’

‘From such little attentions do great favours flow. The king is not pleased with the Lady Anne.’

‘He sent her sables,’ I remind him. ‘Very good ones.’

‘I know. But that is not the point.’

It seems the point to me, but very cleverly I don’t correct him but stand still and wait.

‘He will see you daily,’ my uncle says. ‘And you may continue to please him. Then perhaps he will send you sables. Do you understand?’

This, about the sables, I do understand. ‘Yes.’

‘So if you want presents, and my approval, you will do your best to behave charmingly and pleasantly to the king. Lady Rochford here will advise you.’

She nods at me.

‘Lady Rochford is a most skilled and wise courtier,’ my uncle goes on. ‘There can be few people who have seen more of the king throughout his life. Lady Rochford will tell you how you are to go on. It is our hope and our intention that the king will favour you, that he will, in short, fall in love with you.’

‘Me?’

They both nod. Are they quite mad? He is an old old man, he must have given up all thoughts of love years ago. He has a daughter Princess Mary, far older than me, nearly old enough to be my mother. He is ugly, his teeth are rotten and his limp makes him waddle like a fat old goose. A man like this must have put all thoughts of love out of his head years ago. He might think of me as a granddaughter but not in any other way.

‘But he is marrying Lady Anne,’ I point out.

‘Even so.’

‘He is too old to fall in love.’

My uncle shoots such a scowl at me that I give a little squeak of terror.

‘Fool,’ he says shortly.

I hesitate for a moment. Can they really mean that they want this old king to be my lover? Should I say something about my virginity and my spotless reputation, which in Lambeth seemed to matter so very much?

‘My reputation?’ I whisper.

Again my uncle laughs. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he says.

I look towards Lady Rochford, who was supposed to be my chaperone in a lewd court and watch my behaviour and guard my precious honour.

‘I can explain it all to you later,’ she says.

I take it then that I should say nothing. ‘Yes, my lord,’ I say very sweetly.

‘You are a pretty girl,’ he says. ‘I have given Lady Rochford money for you to have a new gown.’

‘Oh, thank you!’

He smiles at my sudden enthusiasm. He turns to Lady Rochford. ‘And I will leave a manservant with you. He can serve you and run errands. It seems that it may become worth my while to keep a man with you. Who would have thought it? Anyway, keep me informed as to how things go on here.’

She rises from her seat and curtseys. He goes out without another word. The two of us are left alone.

‘What does he want?’ I ask, utterly bewildered.

She looks at me as if she were measuring me for a gown, she looks me up and down. ‘Never mind for now,’ she says kindly. ‘He is pleased with you, that’s the main thing.’

Anne, Blackheath, 3 January 1540

This is the happiest day of my life, because today I have fallen in love. I have fallen in love, not like a silly girl falls in love, because a boy catches her eye or tells her some foolish story. I am in love and this love will last forever. I am in love with England this day, and the realisation has made this the happiest day of my life. This day I realise that I am to be queen of this country, this rich, beautiful country. I have been travelling through it like a fool, with my eyes shut – in all fairness, some of the time I have been travelling through it in darkness and in the worst weather that I could imagine – but today it is bright and sunny and the sky is so blue, blue as duck eggs, the air is fresh and bright, as exciting and cold as white wine. Today I feel like the gyrfalcon my father used to call me, I feel as if I am riding high on cool winds, looking down on this most beautiful country which will be mine. We ride from Dartford to Blackheath, the frost white and shining on the road all the way, and when we get to the park all the ladies of my court are presented to me, all dressed so beautifully and warm and friendly in their greetings. I am to have nearly seventy ladies altogether, the king’s nieces and cousins among them, and they all greet me today as new friends. I am wearing my very best, and I know I look well, I think even my brother would be proud of me today.

They have made a city of tents of cloth of gold, flying brilliantly coloured flags, guarded by the king’s own Yeomen of the Guard, men so tall and so handsome that they are a legend in England. While we wait for the king, we go inside and take a glass of wine and warm ourselves at the braziers, they are burning sea-coal for me, only the best, as I am to be a member of the royal family of England. The floors are lined with rich carpets and the tents hung with tapestries and silks for warmth. Then, when they say it is time, and everyone is smiling and chattering and almost as excited as I am, I mount my horse and ride out to meet him. I go out filled with hope. Perhaps, at this ceremonial meeting, I shall like him and he will like me.

The trees are tall and their bare black winter branches stretch out against the sky like dark threads on a tapestry of blue. The park extends for miles, so green and so fresh, sparking with melting frost, the sun is bright and pale yellow, almost burning white in the sky. Everywhere, held back by gaily coloured ropes, there are the people from London smiling and waving at me and calling blessings down on me, and for the first time in my life I am not Anne – the middle daughter of Cleves: less pretty than Sybilla, less charming than Amelia – but here I am Anne, the only Anne. They have taken me to their hearts. These odd, rich, charming, eccentric people are all welcoming me, as if they want a good queen and an honest queen, and they believe and I know that I can be such a queen for them.

I know very well that I am not an English girl like the late Queen Jane, God rest her soul. But having seen the court and the great families of England I think it might be a good thing that I am not an English girl. Even I can see that the Seymour family is high in favour now, and could easily become overmighty. They are everywhere, these Seymours, handsome and conceited, always emphasising their child is the king’s only son and heir to the throne. If I were the king and it were my court, I should be wary of them. If they are allowed to govern the young prince, to dominate him because of their kinship to his mother, then the balance of this court will all be thrown to them. From what I can see, the king is not careful who he chooses for his favourites. I may be half his age but I know well enough that a ruler’s favour must be measured. I have lived my life with the disfavour of the favourite son and I know how poisonous is whim in a ruler. This king is whimsical; but perhaps I can make his court more balanced, perhaps I can give his son a level-headed stepmother who can maintain the flatterers and the courtiers at a safe distance from the little boy.

I know his daughters have been estranged from him. Poor girls, I so hope to be of service to little Elizabeth, who never knew her mother and has spent her life under the shadow of disgrace. Perhaps I can bring her to court and keep her near me and reconcile her to her father. And the Princess Mary must be lonely, without her mother and knowing herself to be far from her father’s favour. I can be kind to her, I can overcome her fear of the king and bring her to court as my kinswoman, she need not say ‘stepmother’, but perhaps I could be as a good sister to her. For the king’s children at least I can be a great force for good. And if we are blessed, if I am blessed, and we have a child of our own then perhaps I shall give a little prince to England, a godly youth who can help to heal the divisions in this country.

There is a murmur of excitement from the crowd and I see all the heads turn away from me and back again. The king is coming towards us, and all my fears about him are gone in a moment. Now he is not pretending to be a common man, he is not hiding majesty in the disguise of a vulgar old fool, today he is dressed as a king and he rides as a king, in a coat embroidered with diamonds, with a collar of diamonds around his shoulders, on his head a hat of velvet sewn with pearls, and on the finest horse I think I have ever seen. He is magnificent, he looks like a god in the bright winter light, his horse curvetting on his own land, weighed down with jewels, surrounded by the royal guard with the trumpets singing out. He smiles when he draws near to me and we greet each other, and people cheer to see us together.

‘I give you welcome to England,’ he says slowly enough for me to understand, and I reply carefully in English: ‘My lord, I am very glad to be here, and I shall try to be a good wife to you.’

I think I will be happy, I think it can be done. That first embarrassing mistake can be forgotten and put behind us. We will be married for years, we will be happy together for all our lives. In ten years from now, who will ever remember a little thing like that?

Then my chariot comes and I ride through the park to the palace of Greenwich, which is by the river, and all the barges on the river are dressed out in colours with flags flying and the London citizens are dressed in their very best. They have musicians out on the water and they are playing a new song called ‘Merry Anna’, written for me, and there are pageants on the boats to celebrate my coming, and everyone is smiling and waving at me; so I smile and wave back.

Our procession turns up the sweeping approach to Greenwich and I realise again what a country it is, this new home of mine. For this Greenwich is not a castle at all, not fortified in fear against an enemy who might come, it is a palace built for a country at peace, a great, rich, fair palace, as fine as anything in France. It faces the river and is the most beautiful building of stone and precious Venice glass that I have ever seen in my life. The king sees my delighted face and brings his horse alongside my chariot and leans down to tell me that this is just one of his many palaces, but his favourite, and that in time, as we travel around the country, I shall see the others, and that he hopes I shall be happy with them all.

They take me to the queen’s rooms to rest, and for once I do not want to hide in the private rooms, but instead I am glad to be here, with my ladies around me in my privy chamber, and more of them waiting in the great presence chamber outside. I go into the private robing room and change into my taffeta gown, which they have trimmed with the sables that the king gave me for the New Year. I think I have never had such a fortune on my back in my life before. I lead my ladies down to dinner feeling as if I am queen already and at the entrance to the great dining hall the king takes me by the hand and leads me around the tables, where everyone bows and curtseys and we smile and nod, hand-clasped, like husband and wife already.

I am starting to recognise people, and to know their names without prompting, so now the court is not such a friendless blur. I see Lord Southampton, who looks tired and troubled, as well he might be for the work he has done for me in bringing me here. His smile is strained and, oddly, his greeting is cool. He glances away from the king as if there is some trouble brewing, and I remember my resolution to be a fair queen in this court that is commanded by whim. Perhaps I will learn what is troubling Lord Southampton, perhaps I can help him.

The king’s foremost advisor, Thomas Cromwell, bows to me and I recognise him from my mother’s description as the man, more than any other, who sought alliance with us and with the Protestant dukes of Germany. I would have expected him to greet me more warmly, since my marriage is the triumph of his planning, but he is quiet and self-effacing and the king leads me past him with only a short word.

Archbishop Cranmer is dining with us as well, and I recognise Lord Lisle and his wife. He too is looking weary and guarded, and I remember his fears in Calais of the divisions in the kingdom. I smile warmly at him. I know that there is work for me to do in this country. If I can save one heretic from the fires then I will have been a good queen and I am sure I can use my influence to bring this country to peace.

I am starting to feel that I have friends in England, and when I look down the hall and see my ladies, Jane Boleyn, kind Lady Browne, the king’s niece Lady Margaret Douglas and little Katherine Howard among them, I start to feel that this indeed can be my new home, and that the king is indeed my husband, his friends and his children shall be my family, and that I shall be happy here.

Katherine, Greenwich Palace, 3 January 1540

Just as I have always dreamed, there is to be dancing after dinner in a beautiful chamber filled with the most handsome young men in the world. And better than my greatest dreams I have a new gown and pinned to the gown, as obviously, as noticeable as possible, is my new gold brooch given to me by the King of England himself. I finger it all the time, almost as if I were pointing at it and saying to people: ‘What d’you think of that then? Not bad for practically my very first day at court.’ The king is on his throne looking powerful and fatherly, and Lady Anne is as pretty as she can be (given that awful dress) beside him. She might as well have just thrown the sables in the Thames as have them sewn on that taffeta tent. I am so distressed about such wonderful furs all but thrown away that it almost dims my pleasure for a moment.

But then I glance around the room – not in an immodest way, just glancing around as if looking for nothing in particular – and I see first one young, handsome boy and then another, half a dozen indeed that I would be glad to know better. Some of them are sitting together at a table, it is the pages’ table, and every single one of them is a son of a good family, wealthy in their own right, and high in the favour of a lord. Dereham, poor Dereham, would be a nobody to them, Henry Manox would be their servant. These will be my new suitors. I can barely drag my eyes away from any one of them.

I catch a glance or two in my direction and know that prickle of excitement and pleasure that tells me that I am being watched, that I am desired, that my name will be mentioned, that a note will be passed to me, that the whole joyous adventure of flirtation and seduction will start again. A boy will ask my name, will send a message. I will agree to a meeting, there will be an exchange of looks and silly words over dancing and sports and dinner. There will be a kiss, there will be another, then slowly, deliciously, there will be a seduction and I shall know another touch, another boy’s delicious kisses, and I shall fall head over heels in love again.

The dinner is delicious but I pick at my food because at court there is always someone watching you, and I don’t want to seem greedy. Our table faces the front of the hall so it is natural that I look up to see the king at his dinner. In his rich clothes and great collar of gold you might mistake him for one of the old pictures over an altar; I mean, a picture of God. He is so grand and so broad and so weighted with gold and jewels, he sparkles like an old treasure mountain. There is a cloth of gold spread over his great chair, with embroidered curtains hanging down on either side, and every dish is served to him by a servant on his knees. Even the server who offers him a golden bowl to dip his fingers and wipe his hands does so on bended knee. There is another server altogether to hand him the linen cloth. They bow their heads as well when they kneel to him, as if he were of such unearthly importance that they cannot meet his eyes.

So when he looks up and sees me watching him, I don’t know whether I should look away, or curtsey, or what. I am so confused by this that I give him a little smile and half look away and half look back again, to see if he is still watching, and he is. Then I think that this is just what I would do if I was trying to attract a boy, and that makes me blush and look down at my plate, and I feel such a fool. Then, when I look up, under my eyelashes as it happens, to see if he is still looking at me, he is gazing away down the hall and clearly has hardly noticed me at all.

My uncle Howard’s sharp black gaze is on me though, and I am afraid he will frown; perhaps I should have curtseyed to the king when I first caught his eye. But the duke just gives a little approving nod and speaks to a man seated on his right. A man of no interest to me, he must be a hundred and ninety-two if he is a day.

I really am amazed at how old this court is, and the king is quite ancient. I always had the impression of it being a court of young people, young and beautiful and joyful; not such very old men. I swear that there cannot be a friend of the king’s who is a day under forty years. His great friend Charles Brandon, who is said to be a hero of glamour and charm, is absolutely ancient, in his dotage at fifty. My lady grandmother talks about the king as if he was the prince that she knew when she was a girl, and of course this is why I have it all wrong. She is such an old lady that she forgets that long years have gone by. She probably thinks that they are all still young together. When she talks about the queen she always means Queen Katherine of Aragon, not Queen Jane or even the Lady Anne Boleyn. She just skips every queen since Katherine. Indeed, my grandmother was so frightened by the fall of her niece Anne Boleyn that she never speaks of her at all except as a terrible warning to naughty girls like me.

It wasn’t always like that. I can just about remember first coming to my step-grandmama’s house at Horsham and every second sentence was ‘my niece the queen’ and every letter to London asked her for a favour or a fee, a place for a servant, or the pickings of a monastery, asked her to turn out a priest or pull down a nunnery. Then Anne had a girl and there was a good deal of ‘our baby the Princess Elizabeth’ and hopes that the next baby would be a boy. Everyone promised me I would have a place at court in my cousin’s household, I would be kin to the Queen of England, who knew where I might look for a husband? Another Howard cousin, Mary, was married to the king’s bastard son Henry Fitzroy, and a cousin was intended for Princess Mary. We were so inter-married with the Tudors that we would be royal ourselves. But then slowly, like winter coming when you don’t at first notice the chill, there was less spoken of her, and less certainty about her court. Then one day my step-grandmother called the whole household into the great hall and said abruptly that Anne Boleyn (she called her that, no title, definitely no kinship), Anne Boleyn had disgraced herself and her family and betrayed her king and that her name and her brother’s name would never again be mentioned.

Of course we were all desperate to know what had happened but we had to wait for servants’ gossip. Only when the news finally came from London could I learn what my cousin Queen Anne had done. My maid told me, I can hear her now telling me, that Lady Anne was accused of terrible crimes, adultery with many men, her brother among them, witchcraft, treason, bewitching the king, a string of horrors from which only one thing stood out to me, an aghast little girl: that her accuser was her uncle, my uncle Norfolk. That he presided over the court, that he pronounced her death sentence and that his son, my handsome cousin, went to the Tower like a man might go to a fair, dressed in his best, to see his cousin beheaded.

I thought my uncle must be a man so fearsome that he might have been in league with the devil; but I can laugh at those childish fears, now that I am his favourite, so high in his favour that he has ordered Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, to take most particular care of me, and given her money to buy me a gown. Obviously, he has taken a great fancy to me, he likes me best of all the Howard girls he has placed at court, and thinks that I will advance the interests of the family by making a noble match or becoming friends with the queen, or charming to the king. I had thought him a man of fiendish heartlessness but now I find him a kindly uncle to me.

There is a masque after dinner and some very funny clowning from the king’s fool, and then there is some singing that is almost unbearably dull. The king is a great musician, I learn, and so most evenings we will have to endure one of his songs. There is a great deal of tra-la-la-ing and everyone listens very intently and applauds very loudly at the end. Lady Anne I think has no more opinion of it than me, but she makes the mistake of gazing round rather vacantly, as if she were quietly wishing to be elsewhere. I see the king glance at her, and then away, as if he is irritated by her inattention. I take the precaution of clasping my hands beneath my chin and smiling with my eyes half-closed as if I can hardly bear the joy of it. Such luck! He happens to glance my way again and clearly thinks his music has transported me. He gives me a broad, approving smile and I smile back and drop my eyes to the board as if fearful of looking at him for too long.

‘Very well done,’ says Lady Rochford, and I give her a little beam of triumph. I love, I love, I love court life. I swear it will quite turn my head.

Jane Boleyn, Greenwich Palace, 3 January 1540

‘My lord duke,’ I say, bowing very low.

We are in the Howard apartments at Greenwich Palace, a series of beautiful rooms opening the one into another, almost as spacious and beautiful as the queen’s own rooms. I stayed here once with George, when we were newly wed, and I remember the view over the river, and the light at dawn when I woke, so much in love, and I heard the sound of swans flying overhead going down to the river on their huge creaking wings.

‘Ah, Lady Rochford,’ says my lord duke, his lined face amiable. ‘I have need of you.’

I wait.

‘You are friendly with the Lady Anne, you are on good terms?’

‘As far as I can be,’ I say cautiously. ‘She speaks little English as yet but I have made a great effort to talk to her and I think she likes me.’

‘Would she confide in you?’

‘She would speak to her Cleves companions first, I think. But she sometimes asks me things about England. She trusts me, I think.’

He turns to the window and taps his thumbnail against his yellow teeth. His sallow face is creased in thought.

‘There is a difficulty,’ he says slowly.

I wait.

‘As you heard, they have indeed sent her without the proper documents,’ he says. ‘She was betrothed when she was a child to Francis of Lorraine, and the king needs to see that this engagement was cancelled and put aside before he goes any further.’

‘She is not free to marry?’ I demand, astounded. ‘When the contracts have been signed and she has come all this way and been greeted by the king as his bride? When the City of London has welcomed her as their new queen?’

‘It is possible,’ he says evasively.

It is absolutely impossible, but it is not my place to say so. ‘Who says that she may not be free to marry?’

‘The king fears to proceed. His conscience is uneasy.’

I pause, I cannot think fast enough to make sense of this. This is a king who married his own brother’s wife, and then put her aside because he said the lifelong marriage was invalid. This is a king who put Anne Boleyn’s head on the block as a matter of his own judgement under the exclusive guidance of God. Clearly, this is not a king who would be deterred from marrying a woman just because some German ambassador did not have the right piece of paper to hand. Then I remember the moment when she pushed him aside, and his face as he stepped back from her at Rochester.

‘It is true then. He doesn’t like her. He can’t forgive her for her treatment of him at Rochester. He will find a way to get out of the marriage. He is going to claim pre-contract again.’ One glance at the duke’s dark face tells me that I have guessed right and I could almost laugh aloud at this new twist in the play that is King Henry’s comedy. ‘He doesn’t like her and he is going to send her home.’

‘If she confessed that she was pre-contracted she could go home again, without dishonour, and the king would be free,’ the duke says quietly.

‘But she likes him,’ I say. ‘At any rate, she likes him enough. And she can’t go home again. No woman of any sense would go home again. Go back to be spoiled goods in Cleves when you could be Queen of England? She would never want that. Who would marry her if he refuses her? Who could marry her if he declares her pre-contracted? Her life would be over.’

‘She could clear herself of the pre-contract,’ he says reasonably.

‘Is there one?’

He shrugs. ‘Almost certainly not.’

I think for a moment. ‘Then how can she be released from something that does not exist?’

He smiles. ‘That is a matter for the Germans. She can be sent home against her will, if she does not co-operate.’

‘Not even the king can abduct her and fling her out of the kingdom.’

‘If she could be entrapped into saying that there was a pre-contract.’ His voice is like a whisper of silk. ‘If it came from her own mouth that she is not free to marry …’

I nod. I begin to see the favour he would have of me.

‘The king would be most grateful to the man who could tell him that he had a confession from her. And the woman who brought such a confession about would be most high in his favour. And in mine.’

‘I am yours to command,’ I say to give myself time to think. ‘But I cannot make her lie. If she knows she is free to marry, then she would be mad to say otherwise. And if I claim that she has said otherwise, she has only to deny it. Then it is her word against mine and we are back to the truth again.’ I pause as a fear occurs to me. ‘My lord, I take it that there is no possibility of an accusation?’

‘What sort of accusation?’

‘Of some crime?’ I say nervously.

‘Do you mean she might be charged with treason?’

I nod. I will not say the word myself. I wish that I could never hear the word again. It leads to the Tower Green and the executioner’s block. It took the love of my life from me. It ended the life we lived forever.

‘How could it be treason?’ he asks me, as if we do not live in a dangerous world where everything can be treason.

‘The law has changed so much, and being innocent is no defence any more.’

Abruptly he shakes his head. ‘There’s no possibility of him accusing her, anyway. The King of France is entertaining the Holy Roman Emperor in Paris at this very moment. They could be planning a joint attack on us even as we speak. We can do nothing that might upset Cleves. We have to have an alliance with the Protestant princes or we risk standing alone to face a Spain and France that have united against us. If the English Papists rise again as they did before we will be finished. She has to confess herself betrothed to another and go home by her own free will so that we lose the girl and keep the alliance. Or if someone were to trap her into making a confession, that would be good enough. But if she persists in saying that she is free to marry and if she insists upon marriage, then the king will have to do it. We cannot offend her brother.’

‘Whether the king likes it or not?’

‘Though he hates it, though he hates the man who contrived it, and even though he hates her.’

I pause for a moment. ‘If he hates her and yet marries her he will find some way to be rid of her later.’ I am thinking aloud.

The duke says nothing but his eyelids hood his dark eyes. ‘Oh, who can foretell the future?’

‘She will be in the greatest of danger every day of her life,’ I predict. ‘If the king wants rid of her he will soon think that it is God’s will that he is rid of her.’

‘That is generally the way that God’s will seems to be manifest,’ the duke says with a wolfish grin.

‘Then he will find her guilty of some offence,’ I say. I will not say the word treason.

‘If you care for her at all, you would persuade her to go now,’ the duke says quietly.

I walk slowly back to the queen’s rooms. She will not be advised by me, in preference to her ambassadors; and I am not free to tell her what I truly think. But if I had been her true friend I would have told her that Henry is not a man to take as a husband if he hates you before the wedding day. His malice towards women who cross him is fatal. Who would know better than me?

Anne, Greenwich Palace, 3 January 1540

The lady in waiting Jane Boleyn seems troubled and I tell her that she can sit beside me and I ask her, in English, if she is well.

She beckons my translator to come and sit with us, and she says that she is troubled by a matter of some delicacy.

I think it must be something about precedence at the wedding, they are so anxious about the order of the service and what jewels everyone may wear. I nod as if it is a serious matter and ask her if I may serve her.

‘On the contrary; I am anxious to be of service to you,’ she says, speaking quietly to Lotte. She translates for me, I nod. ‘I hear that your ambassadors have forgotten to bring the contract that releases you from a previous betrothal.’

‘What?’ I speak so sharply that she guesses the meaning of the German word, and nods, her face as grave as my own.

‘So they have not told you?’

I shake my head. ‘Nothing,’ I say in English. ‘They tell nothing.’

‘Then I am glad to speak with you before you are ill-advised,’ she says rapidly and I wait as the words are translated. She leans forwards and takes my hands. Her clasp is warm, her face intent. ‘When they ask you about your previous betrothal you must tell them that it was annulled, and that you have seen the document,’ she says earnestly. ‘If they ask why your brother failed to send it, you can say that you don’t know, that it is not your responsibility to bring the papers – as indeed it was not.’

I am breathless; something about her intensity makes me feel fearful. I cannot think why my brother should be so careless of my marriage, then I remember his constant resentment of me. He has betrayed his own plan from malice; at the last moment he could not bear to let me go smoothly from him.

‘I see you are shocked,’ she says. ‘Dearest Lady Anne, be warned by me, and never let them think for a moment that there is no document, that you have a previous betrothal still in place. You must tell a powerful and convincing lie. You must tell them that you have seen the documents and that your previous betrothal was definitely annulled.’

‘But it was,’ I say slowly. I repeat in English so she cannot be mistaken. ‘I have seen the document. It is not a lie. I am free to marry.’

‘You are certain?’ she asks intently. ‘These things can be done without a girl knowing what plans are made. No-one would blame you if you were at all uncertain. You can tell me. Trust me. Tell me the truth.’

‘It was cancelled,’ I say again. ‘I know that it was cancelled. The betrothal was my father’s plan; but not my brother’s. When my father was ill and then died, then my brother ruled, and the betrothal was finished.’

‘Why do you not have the document, then?’

‘My brother,’ I start. ‘My foolish brother … My brother is careless of my well-being,’ Lotte rapidly translates. ‘And my father died so recently, and my mother is so distressed, there has been too much for him to do. My brother has the document in our records room, I myself have seen it; but he must have forgotten to send it. There was so much to arrange.’

‘If you are in any doubt at all you must tell me,’ she cautions me. ‘And I can advise you what best we should do. You see from my coming to you and advising you that I am utterly loyal to you. But if there is any chance that your brother does not have the document you must tell me, Lady Anne, tell me for your own safety, and I will plan with you what we can best do.’

I shake my head. ‘I thank you for your care of me but there is no need. I have seen the documents myself, and so have my ambassadors,’ I say. ‘There is no impediment, I know I am free to marry the king.’

She nods as if she is still waiting for something else. ‘I am so glad.’

‘And I want to marry the king.’

‘If you wished to avoid the marriage, now you have seen him, you could do so,’ she says very quietly. ‘This is your chance to escape. If you did not like him, you could get safely home, with no word against you. I could help you. I could tell them that you had told me that you are not certain, that you may be pre-contracted.’

I withdraw my hands from hers. ‘I do not want to escape,’ I say simply. ‘This is a great honour for me and my country, and a great joy for me.’

Jane Boleyn looks sceptical.

‘Truly,’ I say. ‘I long to be Queen of England, I am coming to love this country and I want to make my life here.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Yes, on my honour.’ I hesitate and then I tell her the greatest reason. ‘I was not very happy at my home,’ I admit. ‘I was not highly regarded or well treated. Here I can be somebody, I can do good. At home I will never be more than an unwanted sister.’

She nods. Many women know what it is to be in the way while the great affairs of men go on without them.

‘I want to have a chance,’ I say. ‘I want to have a chance to be the woman I can be. Not my brother’s creature, not my mother’s daughter. I want to stay here and grow into myself.’

She is silent for a moment, I am surprised at the depth of my own feeling. ‘I want to be a woman in my own right,’ I say.

‘A queen is not free,’ she points out.

‘She is better than a duke’s disliked sister.’

‘Very well,’ she says quietly.

‘I suppose the king must be angry with my ambassadors for forgetting the papers?’ I ask.

‘I am sure that he is,’ she says, her eyes slide sideways. ‘But they will give their word that you are free to marry and I am sure it will all go ahead.’

‘There is no possibility of the marriage being delayed?’ I am surprised at my own feeling. I have such a strong sense that I can do much for this country, that I can be a good queen here. I want to start at once.

‘No,’ she says. ‘The ambassadors and the king’s council will resolve it. I am sure.’

I pause. ‘He does want to marry me?’

She smiles at me and touches my hand. ‘Of course he does. This is just a small difficulty. The ambassadors will undertake to produce the document and the marriage will go ahead. Just as long as you are certain that the document is there?’

‘It is there,’ I say, and I am speaking nothing but the truth. ‘I can swear to it.’

Katherine, Greenwich Palace, 6 January 1540

I am to help the queen to dress for her wedding and I have to get up extremely early to get everything ready, I would rather not get up early, but it is nice to be singled out from the other girls who sleep so late and so lazy. Really it’s very bad of them to lie in bed so late when some of us are up and working for Lady Anne. Truly, everyone but me is completely idle.

I lay out her dress as she is washing in her closet. Catherine Carey helps me spread out the skirt and the underskirts on the closed chest as Mary Norris goes for her jewels. The skirt is enormous, like a great fat spinning top, I would rather die than marry in a dress like this; the greatest beauty in the world could not help but look like a pudding, waddling out to be eaten. It is hardly worth being queen if you have to go around like a tent, I think. The cloth is extremely fine – cloth of gold – and it is heavy with the most wonderful pearls, and she has a coronet to wear. Mary has put it out before the mirror and if no-one else was here I would try it on, but already, though it is so early, there are half a dozen of us, servants and maids and ladies in waiting, and so I have to give it a little polish and leave it alone. It is very finely wrought, she brought it from Cleves with her and she told me that the spiky bits are supposed to be rosemary, which her own sister wore as a fresh herb in her hair at her wedding. I say it looks like a crown of thorns and her lady secretary gives me a sharp look and doesn’t translate my remark. Just as well, really.

She will wear her hair loose and when she comes out of the bathroom she sits before her silver looking-glass, and Catherine brushes her hair with long, smooth strokes, like you would a horse’s tail. She is fair-haired, to be just to her she is quite golden-haired, and wrapped in a bath sheet and glowing from her wash, she looks well this morning. She is a little pale, but she smiles at all of us, and she seems happy enough. If I were her I would be dancing for joy to be Queen of England. But I suppose she is not the dancing sort.

Off she goes for the wedding and we all fall in behind her in strict order of importance, which means that I am so far back it is hardly worth my while being there, nobody will be able to see me, even though I am wearing my new gown that is trimmed with silver thread, the most costly thing I have ever owned. It is a very pale grey-blue, and suits my eyes. I never looked better; but it is not my wedding and nobody pays any attention to me at all.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.