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healed from the first. Charles – much married, good at women – understood. And what they don’t tell you – unless they’re Anne Boleyn – is that the all-jousting type of man doesn’t actually have much energy left for the bedroom. Not when he’s over thirty, certainly.
    Charles must have considered that he was doing me a kindness by mostly leaving me alone and of course in a way he was. But months became years and then it had been so long – practically all my adult life – that I wouldn’t have known how to start if I’d had to. That was something I pondered that night: how had Kate known how to start , when it came to it? I had to conclude that Thomas – resolutely non-jousting Thomas – had taken the trouble to show her.

Nine
    The day I set off back home from that first visit, Kate was up late and then at prayers, then talking with the girls’ tutor. Having sent word that I’d like to be fetched when she was free, I remained in my room and helped Bella pack up. Or tried to, but Bella’s too capable to need or probably even welcome my help. I had none of my own ladies for company; I’d come unattended, this trip – Joanna being due her first child, and Nichola having returned to her family home. I used the time to tackle some correspondence. When I finally got to Kate’s room, she was treating herself to a bath. Her ladies Marcella and Agnes seemed to have exhausted themselves preparing it, and were reclined on cushions by the fire, reading. I ducked through the canopies, brushing aside bunches of lavender, and there was Kate amid more lavender in a tub of deep oats-creamy water.
    ‘Bath time,’ I said, pointlessly – a mere envious purr – andshe smiled in response, closed her eyes and smiled even wider. On a table beside the tub was a big brass bowl: she’d be washing her hair, then, too. In the steaming water, among the usual cinnamon and liquorice sticks and cumin seeds, were slices of lemon.
    I queried: ‘Lemon?’
    ‘It’s good. Lightens your hair.’ Her eyes sprang open. ‘Not your hair,’ she retracted. ‘Lightens light hair.’
    Yes: no good for me. Cloves and rosemary for me.
    ‘Do you really have to go?’ she asked.
    I pulled up a stool, sat. ‘Houses don’t run themselves, do they.’ I’ve an excellent steward – a legacy of Charles, who appointed well and inspired loyalty – but there’s only so much he can do, or is willing to do. There’s only so much that it’s fair of me to expect him to take on. I do the household accounts. More than a hundred people look to me, ultimately, to keep them fed and clothed and educated. All those people needing to be encouraged, placated and sometimes, unfortunately, reprimanded: ladies and gentlemen, senior members of staff and the servants who work under them, and all their children. In kitchens and storehouses, chapel, gardens, laundry, the farm and stables. Permission to be given and funds found for orders: four or six hundred oranges this month, and four hundred or five hundred eggs? Each head of department will know his or her own requirements, but it’s me who has to bring them together. We need barrels of soap for the laundry, but we also need soap for the kitchens and for our bedrooms. Wax for candles, of course, for the chandlery; but also for the laundresses, so that they can seal the edges of some of our clothes. We need bolts of fabric for me and the boys, and for our ladies and their children,and ushers and pages and maidservants; but we also need kitchen aprons and chapel robes, tablecloths, saddlecloths, blankets, curtains. And boots, the children have to be kept in boots: that’s what always seems to catch me out, and – it seems to me – most often with my own children. How many times have we been ready to journey between London and Lincolnshire and I’ve glanced down to see holes in Harry’s or Charlie’s boots? And then we’ve had to delay for a new pair to be made. As lady of the household, I did all