I nodded. 'That memory still sickens me.'

'Everyone was surprised how suddenly she fell last year. Though she was much disliked.'

'Yes. The Midnight Crow.'

'They say the head tried to speak after it was cut off.'

I held up a hand. 'I can't talk about it, Mark. I was there as an official of state. Come, you are right. We should sleep.'

He looked disappointed, but said nothing more, banking up the fire with logs. We clambered into bed. From where I lay I could see through the window that the snow still fell, the flakes outlined against a lit window some way off. Some of the monks were up late, but then the days when the brethren retired before dark in winter, to be up for prayer again at midnight, were long gone.

Despite my tiredness I tossed and turned, my mind still active. I thought especially of the girl Alice. Everyone was potentially in danger in this place, but a woman alone was always more at risk than most. I liked the spark of character I had seen in her. It reminded me of Kate.

Despite my will to sleep, I found my tired mind going back three years. Kate Wyndham was the daughter of a London cloth merchant accused of false accounting by his partner, in a case brought in the Church court on the basis that a contract was equivalent to an oath before God. In fact his partner was related to an archdeacon who had influence with the judge, and I managed to get the case transferred to King's Bench, where it was thrown out. The grateful merchant, a widower, invited me to dinner and there I met his only daughter.

Kate was lucky; her father believed in educating women beyond what they needed for the kitchen accounts, and she had a lively mind. She had a sweet, heart-shaped face, too, and rich brown hair falling round her shoulders. She was the first woman I had ever met with whom I could talk as an equal. She liked nothing better than to discuss the doings of the law, the court, even the Church – for her father's experience had turned them both into ardent reformers. Those evenings talking with her and her father at their house, and later the afternoons with Kate alone when she accompanied me on long walks into the countryside, were the best times of my life.

I knew she saw me as only a friend – it became a joke between us that I conversed with her as freely as with another man – yet I began to wonder if it might not blossom into something more. I had been in love before but always held from pressing my suit, fearing my twisted form could only bring rejection and I would be better waiting till I had built a fortune that I could offer as a compensating attraction. But I could give Kate other things she would value: good conversation, companionship, a circle of congenial friends.

I wonder to this day what might have happened had I shown my real feelings earlier, but I left it too late. One evening I called at her house unannounced and found her sitting with Piers Stackville, the son of a business associate of her father's. I was unworried at first, for although handsome as Satan, Stackville was a young man of few accomplishments beyond a laboriously mannered chivalrousness. But I saw her blush and simper at his crass remarks; my Kate transformed into a silly girl. From then on she could talk of nothing but what Piers had said or done, with sighs and smiles that cut me to the heart.

In the end I told her of my feelings. It was clumsily and stupidly done, I fumbled and faltered at my words. The worst thing was her utter surprise.

'Matthew, I thought you wanted only to befriend me, I have never heard one word of love from you. You appear to have kept much hidden.'

I asked her if it was too late.

'If you had asked me even six months before – perhaps,' she said sadly.

'I know my form is not such as to stir passion.'

'You do yourself disservice!' she said with unexpected heat. 'You have a fine manly face and good courtesy, you make too much of your bent back, as though you were the only man that had one. You have too much self-pity, Matthew, too much pride.'

'Then-'

She shook her head, tears in her eyes. 'It is too late. I love Piers. He is to ask Father for my hand.'

I said roughly that he was not good enough, she would pine away from boredom, but she replied hotly that soon she would have children and a good house to look after and was that not a woman's proper role, appointed by God? I was crushed and took my leave.

I never saw her again. A week later the sweating sickness hit the City like a hurricane. Hundreds began shivering and sweating, took to their beds and died within two days. It struck high and low and it took both Kate and her father. I remember their funeral, which I had arranged as the old man's executor, the wooden boxes slowly lowered into the earth. Looking at Piers Stackville over the coffin, his ravaged face told me he had loved Kate no less than I. He nodded to me in silent acknowledgement and I nodded back with a small, sad smile. I thanked God that at least I had released myself from the false doctrine of purgatory, which would have had Kate enduring its pains. I knew that her pure soul must be saved, at rest with Christ.

Tears come to my eyes as I write these words. They came to me that first night at Scarnsea, too. I let them fall silently, keeping myself from sobbing lest I waken Mark to an embarrassing scene. They cleansed me, and I slept.

But the nightmare returned that night. I had not dreamed of Queen Anne's killing for months, but seeing Singleton's body brought all back. Again I stood on Tower Green on a bright spring morning, one of the huge crowd standing round the straw-covered scaffold. I was at the front of the crowd; Lord Cromwell had ordered all those under his patronage to attend and identify themselves with the queen's fall. He himself stood nearby, at the front of the crowd. He had risen as one of Anne Boleyn's party; now he had prepared the indictment for adultery that brought her down. He stood frowning sternly, the embodiment of angry justice.

Straw was laid thickly around the block, and the executioner brought from France stood in his sinister black hood, arms folded. I looked for the sword he had brought to ensure a merciful end, at the queen's own request, but could not see it. I stood with my head deferentially lowered, for some of the greatest men in the land were there: Lord Chancellor Audley, Sir Richard Rich, the Earl of Suffolk.

We stood like statues, no one talking at the front, though there was a buzz of conversation from the crowd behind. There is an apple tree on Tower Green. It was in full blossom and a blackbird sat singing on a high branch, careless of the crowd. I watched it, envying the creature its freedom.

There was a stirring, and the queen appeared. She was flanked by ladies-in-waiting, a surpliced chaplain and the red-coated guards. She looked thin and haggard, bony shoulders hunched inside her white cloak, her hair tied up in a coif. As she approached the block she kept looking back, as though a messenger might arrive with a reprieve from the king. After nine years at the heart of the court she should have known better; this great orchestrated spectacle would not be stopped. As she came close, huge brown eyes surrounded by dark rings darted wildly round the scaffold and I think, like me, she was looking for the sword.

In my dream there are none of the long preliminaries; no long prayers, no speech from the scaffold by Queen Anne beseeching all to pray for the life of the king. In my dream she kneels down at once, facing the crowd, and starts to pray. I hear again her thin harsh cries, over and over, 'Jesu, receive my soul! Lord God, have pity on my soul!' Then the executioner bends and produces the great sword from where it had lain hidden in the straw. 'So that's where it was,' I think, then flinch and cry out as it swings through the air faster than the eye can follow and the queen's head flies up and outwards in a great spray of blood. Again I feel a rush of nausea and close my eyes as a great murmur comes from the crowd, broken by the odd 'hurrah'. I open them again at the prescribed words, 'So perish all the king's enemies,' barely intelligible in the executioner's French accent. The straw and his clothes are drenched with the blood that still pumps from the corpse, and he holds up the queen's dripping head.