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“There are rumours,” he said. “Rumours that the conspirators stand at the ready in Northumberland and along the West Marches to spirit Katherine away.

Would he never be gone? I could not mask this pain much longer. “So the dream has come about, and the Papal forces are ready to move,” I said. “It was inevitable. Yet”—another spasm of pain—“if Katherine is ill enough, it all comes to nothing.” Yes, the Devil was stupid to wound Katherine.

“Out of England, she might rally.”

True. Beyond our shores, treated as her vanity dictated, hearing words of flattery and submission, she would mend quickly enough.

“Out of England she shall never go,” I said. “And as for her misguided knights-errant, we shall disempower them, subtly, so that when and if the time ever comes when they might try to move ... they shall find themselves stuck fast.”

Poor Katherine. She would never know of her would-be rescuers.

“I would send the Princess Dowager a token of encouragement in her illness,” I told Crum. “Not Chapuys. But a box of delicacies, and one of my musicians.... See to the land arrangements.”

There, that should occupy him. Else I might scream if he did not immediately quit my presence and allow me to massage my leg.

Anne’s pregnancy fared well; the most healthy being in all England was that one which lay within her womb. While her magic blighted all of her enemies, her child and her salvation waxed strong.

The year slipped further toward the dark bottom of its wheel. My leg did not mend, but at least it did not worsen. Fitzroy, whom I had brought to court under the pretext of inviting him to keep Christmas with us, remained pale and wracked with a cough (it sounded the very same as Father’s), but likewise did not worsen. Mary hung in the limbo of not-truly-ill/not-truly-well, and I was given the painful task of refusing Katherine’s natural pleas to help her. She had written Chapuys:

I beg you to speak to the King, and desire him from me to be so charitable as to send his daughter and mine where I am, because if I care for her with my own hands and by the advice of my own and other physicians, and God still pleases to take her from this world, my heart will be at peace, otherwise in great pain. Say to His Highness that there is no need for anyone to nurse her but myself, that I will put her in my own bed in my own chamber and watch with her when needful.

I have recourse to you, knowing that there is no one else in this kingdom who will dare to say to the King, my lord, that which I am asking you to say. I pray God to reward your imm in a costume from Turkey....

The wife of my youth. She had been the wife of my youth, and in dying she took that with her. Those lost days gleamed now more brightly than ever.

I mourned for the Spanish Princess, angry that her life had been, on the whole, so sad. And now there was no hope for anything better, no last-minute changes. She lay beyond all changes.

What sort of faith did I have, then? Presumably she had passed into another world, where all such considerations were cast aside. She was in glory, clothed in a spiritual body, no longer the Spanish Princess or the crippled, sickly old woman she had changed into, but changed yet again into something glittering and immortal. While her physical body was being cut open and embalmed, the immortal Katherine was long since departed, rewarded beyond anything I could ever have bestowed on her.

So I believed ... so I believed....

But if it were not so? If the poor old body was all there was, then what a cruel reward. I wept, alone in my private box in the Chapel Royal, astonished and bewildered at my tears. Did I not believe? Were all my beliefs hollow, worthless? That was what my tears betrayed.

For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised. It follows also that those who have died within Christ’s fellowship are utterly lost. If it is for this life only that Christ has given us hope, we of all men are most to be pitied.

I should not be weeping for Katherine