“We wish to ask you about the queen’s behavior at Lambeth when she was a girl,” he says. He nods at the clerk to indicate that he should write.

“I know nothing about it,” I say. “As you will see from your own records I was in the country, at Blickling Hall, and then in service with Queen Anne, to whom I gave good and honorable service. I did not know Katherine Howard until she came to serve Queen Anne.”

The clerk makes one mark, only one. I see it. It is a tick. This means that they knew what I would say, that it is not worth writing down. They have prepared for this interview; I should not trust a word they say. They know what they want to say and what they want me to reply. I have to be ready. I have to be armed against them. I wish I could think clearly; I wish my thoughts were not such a whirl. I must be calm. I must be clever.

“When the queen took on Francis Dereham as her secretary, did you know that he was her old friend and previous lover?”

“No, I knew nothing of her life before,” I say.

The clerk puts down a tick. This, too, is expected.

“When the queen asked you to fetch Thomas Culpepper to her room, did you know what were her intentions?”

I am stunned. How do we go from Francis Dereham to Thomas Culpepper in one leap? How do they know of Thomas Culpepper? What do they know of Thomas Culpepper? What has he told them? Is he on the rack vomiting in pain and sicking up the truth?

“She never asked me,” I say.

The clerk puts down a dash.

“We know that she asked you to fetch him, and we know that he came. Now, to save your life, will you tell us what took place between Thomas Culpepper and Katherine Howard?”

The clerk’s pen is poised; I can feel the words in my dry mouth. It is over. She is ruined, he is a dead man, I am on the brink of betrayal: again.

The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk has been questioned on her sickbed as to the behavior of her granddaughter. She will be tried for letting the girl go to the king without warning him that she was no virgin. This is now called treason. She will be accused of treason because her granddaughter took a lover. If she is found guilty, that will be another old lady’s head on Henry’s block.

Dereham is accused with Culpepper of presumptive treason. The cause is that they both had intercourse with the queen. Dereham is accused even though there is no evidence against him and most believe that he laid with her long before she was queen, before even I was queen. Nonetheless, this is to be called treason. The king has named Katherine Howard as a “common harlot” – oh, Kitty, that anyone should speak like that of you! Both young men plead guilty to presumptive treason in the hopes of forgiveness. Both deny having lain with the queen. Their judge – unbelievable though it is to anyone but a subject of King Henry’s – is the Duke of Norfolk, who knows more of this than any man can say. His Grace the duke has returned from the country to hear the evidence of his niece Katherine promising to marry Dereham, admitting him to her bedroom and to her bed. He has heard the evidence of Dereham coming into her household when she was queen, and that is apparently enough to prove the young couple guilty. For why, the inquisitors indignantly demand, would Dereham come to work for the queen if not to seduce her? The idea that he would hope to profit from her success as all the rest of them have done, her uncle among them, is not mentioned.

Culpepper started by denying everything, but once the queen’s ladies had given their statements, Lady Rochford among them, he could see that he was finished and he is now pleading guilty. Both young men are to be half hanged and then their bellies slit open, their guts pulled out, and then butchered as they bleed to death, for the crime of loving the pretty girl who married the king.

This foreshadows Katherine’s fate. I know it, and I am on my knees for her every day. If the men accused of loving her are to be killed in the cruelest way that England can devise, then the chances of her being forgiven and released are slight indeed. I am afraid she will spend the rest of her life in the Tower. Dear God, she is only sixteen now. Do they not think that two years ago she was too young to judge? Did her own uncle not think that a girl of fourteen is not likely to resist temptation when she is constantly encouraged to indulge her whims in everything? I don’t even consider what Henry thought; Henry is a madman. He thought of nothing but his own pleasure in her, and his own belief that she adored him. That is what she will pay for: for disappointing the vain dreams of a madman. As I did.

When I turned away from him in disgust at Rochester, he hated me for it, and he punished me for it as soon as he could, calling me ugly and fat with slack breasts and belly, no virgin, full of noisome airs, stinking, in fact. When Kitty chooses a young handsome man over his bloated, rotting body, he calls her a scandal and a whore. He punishes me with shame and exile from the court, and then takes pleasure in showing his generosity. I don’t think she will get off so lightly.

I am on my knees in my privy chamber at my prie-dieu when I hear the door behind me open quietly. I am so afraid of my shadow in these dangerous days that I spin around. It is Lotte, my lady secretary, and her face is white.

“What is it?” I am on my feet at once. Stumbling as my heel catches the hem of my gown, I nearly fall and have to catch onto the little altar to save myself. The cross wobbles and crashes down to the floor.

“They have arrested your maid Frances, and they have taken your squire Richard Taverner, too.”

I gasp in terror, and then I wait until I can breathe out again. She mistakes my blank face for incomprehension, and she repeats the awful thing she has just said in German: “They have arrested your lady-in-waiting Frances, and they have taken Richard Taverner, too.”

“On what charges?” I whisper.

“They don’t say. The inquisitors are in the house now. We are all to be questioned.”

“They must have said something.”

“Just that we are all to be questioned. Even you.”

I am icy with fear. “Quick,” I say. “Go to the stables at once and get a boy to take a boat downriver to Dr. Harst in London. Tell him that I am in grave danger. Go at once. Go by the garden stairs, and make sure no one sees you.”

She nods and goes to the little private door to the garden as the other door to my presence chamber is thrown open and five men walk in.

“Stop right there,” one of them orders, seeing the open door. Lotte stops; she does not even look toward me.

“I was just going to the garden,” she says in English. “I need to take the air. I am unwell.”

“You are under arrest,” he replies.

I step forward. “On what grounds? What is alleged against her?”

The senior man, one I don’t know, steps toward me and bows slightly. “Lady Anne,” he says. “There are reports circulating in London that there has been grave wrongdoing in your household. The king has commanded that we investigate. Anyone attempting to hide anything or failing to assist our investigation will be regarded as an enemy to the king, and guilty of treason.”

“We are all good subjects of our lord the king,” I say quickly. I can hear the fear in my own voice. He will hear it, too. “But there is no wrongdoing in my household; I am innocent of any wrongdoing.”

He nods. Presumably Kitty Howard said the same; as did Culpepper and Dereham.

“These are trying times, and we have to root out sin,” he says simply. “If you please, you will stay in this room, with this lady as companion if you wish, while we question your household. Then we will come to speak with you.”