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unnecessarily Welsh.
    â€œMeanwhile her women had put the little creature into bed; or said they had, for they thought that in bed she would be safe against him. Not a bit. King Henry strode through the rooms, looking as if he had in mind to tear back the bedclothes. The women bundled her into some decency. He burst into the chamber. At the sight of her, he forgot his Latin. He stammered and backed out like a tongue-tied boy.” The cardinal chuckled. “And then when she first danced at court—our poor prince Arthur sat smiling on the dais, but the little girl could hardly sit still in her chair—no one knew the Spanish dances, so she took to the floor with one of her ladies. I will never forget that turn of her head, that moment when her beautiful red hair slid over one shoulder . . . There was no man who saw it who didn’t imagine—though the dance was in fact very sedate . . . Ah dear. She was sixteen.”
    The cardinal looks into space and Thomas says, “God forgive you?”
    â€œGod forgive us all. The old king was constantly taking his lust to confession. Prince Arthur died, then soon after the queen died, and when the old king found himself a widower he thought he might marry Katherine himself. But then . . .” He lifts his princely shoulders. “They couldn’t agree over the dowry, you know. The old fox, Ferdinand, her father. He would fox you out of any payment due. But our present Majesty was a boy of ten when he danced at his brother’s wedding, and, in my belief, it was there and then that he set his heart on the bride.”
    They sit and think for a bit. It’s sad, they both know it’s sad. The old king freezing her out, keeping her in the kingdom and keeping her poor, unwilling to miss the part of the dowry he said was still owing, and equally unwilling to pay her widow’s portion and let her go. But then it’s interesting too, the extensive diplomatic contacts the little girl picked up during those years, the expertise in playing off one interest against another. When Henry married her he was eighteen, guileless. His father was no sooner dead than he claimed Katherine for his own. She was older than he was, and years of anxiety had sobered her and taken something from her looks. But the real woman was less vivid than the vision in his mind; he was greedy for what his older brother had owned. He felt again the little tremor of her hand, as she had rested it on his arm when he was a boy of ten. It was as if she had trusted him, as if—he told his intimates—she had recognized that she was never meant to be Arthur’s wife, except in name; her body was reserved for him, the second son, upon whom she turned her beautiful blue-gray eyes, her compliant smile. She always loved me, the king would say. Seven years or so of diplomacy, if you can call it that, kept me from her side. But now I need fear no one. Rome has dispensed. The papers are in order. The alliances are set in place. I have married a virgin, since my poor brother did not touch her; I have married an alliance, her Spanish relatives; but, above all, I have married for love.
    And now? Gone. Or as good as gone: half a lifetime waiting to be expunged, eased from the record.
    â€œAh, well,” the cardinal says. “What will be the outcome? The king expects his own way, but she, she will be hard to move.”
    There is another story about Katherine, a different story. Henry went to France to have a little war; he left Katherine as regent. Down came the Scots; they were well beaten, and at Flodden the head of their king cut off. It was Katherine, that pink-and-white angel, who proposed to send the head in a bag by the first crossing, to cheer up her husband in his camp. They dissuaded her; told her it was, as a gesture, un-English. She sent, instead, a letter. And with it, the surcoat in which the Scottish king had died, which was stiffened, black and crackling with his