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Thomas.
    ‘Bet the girls’ll be tired,’ I said, because I was uncertain what else to say. ‘It was very early. Before five.’
    ‘Before five?’ That had her attention. She seemed to stop and think. ‘Well,’ she continued, ‘they should have a good, long nap after lunch. I’ll tell William,’ their tutor.
    I almost laughed. The girls, miss a lesson? . And Kate herself rising late. What was going on? I tried to look merely mildly interested. ‘Does Thomas do this often?’
    ‘Wake the girls?’ She dabbed a damask napkin to her lips.
    I shrugged. ‘Wake people.’
    She stood, indicated to her maid that she’d finished. ‘Well, he’s always waking me,’ a quick smile, ‘but not to take me to the river.’

    I was shocked, to be honest. Which in itself shocked me. Because I’m unshockable, aren’t I? Everyone knows that. Yet there I was, feeling flushed and – deeper – chilled. That’s shock, isn’t it? But why? What on earth had I been thinking? That they didn’t sleep together? Newlyweds? Happy newly-weds? In truth, I hadn’t been thinking about it at all. There was so much else about them that was a puzzle. Was it, then, Kate’s mention of it that shocked me? Her direct mention of it? No, because sex wasn’t a popular topic of conversation with her, but it certainly wasn’t unmentionable. And, anyway, it wasn’t direct, what she said. But nor was it coy. I didn’t quite know what it was. An aside, a quip; it had felt like a brush-off. I realise, now, what it was that shocked me. It wasn’t what she said, but how she said it. As an aside, while she stood up and turned away. Allowing me a glimpse, but only so much, as if it were nothing of significance.
    It was something I thought about as I lay in bed that night. Kate, like me, had probably had only one lover. Three marriages, but probably only one lover.Ted, her first husband, had been too old; I remembered now that she’d told me, ‘There was none of that.’ I hadn’t known her really in thosedays, the brief time of Ted; not properly. ‘It wasn’t a bad life for a girl,’ was what she later told me about it; and indeed she was a girl – fifteen, sixteen – in those days, younger than her own stepchildren. Her next husband was John and he, too, was a lot older than she was, but he wasn’t too old. Come to think of it, when they married he was probably younger than Thomas is now. John and Kate were married for fifteen years. John had been her lover. And then Henry, the king: nothing much doing there. I’d wanted to know, of course; everyone had wanted to know, but she actually did tell me. He’d tried, was what she whispered; he’d tried, a couple of times, and then given up. She gave me a look, and I pulled a face, said, ‘Thank God,’ to which her response was nothing more than a wan smile. Because the less said, the better. Not that it was news in Henry’s case. Anne Boleyn had famously decried his stamina – it was one of the misdemeanours for which she died – and, frankly, the record had been poor since then, with his fifth queen, little Catherine Howard, too stupid to realise that it didn’t mean she could take her pleasures elsewhere.
    Pleasures . Me, like Kate: just the one lover. My husband. I bet people assumed that Charles and I were lovers for all twelve years of our marriage. Because we were clearly in love; because Charles was what they call a full-blooded man, a ladies’ man, he was so evidently all man; and because – I know what they think – I’m what’s known as hot-headed, headstrong, which is taken to mean hot-blooded.Well, people know nothing, do they. I spent the first couple of years of our marriage having babies. And then there I was, sixteen, with two babies under two. Enough, as far as I was concerned: I’d done my duty and was anxious not to get pregnant again.Really anxious. And Charles was anxious not to hurt me. I hadn’t recovered from the second birth, no doubt because I hadn’t