“Against Spain.”

“They can do that without me! They can make an alliance without me!”

“The King of France and your brother want you restored, and the king wants to rid himself of the memory of Katherine. It is to be just as it was. It is to be as if she never existed. As if you have just arrived in England, and everything can go as planned.”

“He is Henry of England, but not even he can turn back the clock!” I cry out, and I push myself up from my chair and stride across the room. “I won’t do it. I daren’t do it. He will have me killed within a year. He is a wife killer. He takes a woman and destroys her. It has become his habit. This will be my death!”

“If he were to deal with you honorably-”

“Dr. Harst, I have escaped him once; I am the only wife of his to come out from the marriage alive! I can’t go back to put my head on the block.”

“I am advised that he would offer you guarantees-”

“This is Henry of England!” I round on the ambassador. “This is a man who has been the death of three wives and is now building the scaffold for a fourth! There are no guarantees. He is a murderer. If you put me in his bed, I am a dead woman.”

“He will divorce Queen Katherine, I am certain of it. He has laid it before parliament. They know that she was no virgin when she married him. The news of her scandalous behavior has been released to the ambassadors at the European courts for them to announce. She is publicly named as a whore. He will put her aside. He will not kill her.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“There is no reason for him to kill her,” he says gently. “You are overwrought; you are not thinking clearly. She married him under false pretenses; that is a sin, and she is wrong. He has announced that. But since they were not married, she has not cuckolded him; he has no reason to do anything other than let her go.”

“Then why is he seeking more evidence against her?” I ask. “Since he has enough against her to name her as a whore, since he has enough against her to bring her into shame and divorce her? Why does he need more evidence?”

“To punish the men,” he replies.

Our eyes meet; neither of us knows what we dare to believe.

“I fear him,” I say miserably.

“And so you should; he is a fearsome king. But he divorced you, and he kept his word to you. He made a fair settlement on you, and he has kept you in peace and prosperity. Perhaps he will divorce her and make a settlement on her; perhaps this is his way now. Then he may want to marry you again.”

“I cannot,” I say quietly. “Believe me, Dr. Harst, even if you are right and he treats Katherine with forgiveness, even with generosity, I would not dare to marry him. I cannot bear to be married to him again. I still thank God on my knees every morning for my good fortune in escaping last time. When the councillors ask you, or my brother asks you, or the French ambassador asks you, then you must tell them that I am settled to the single state – I believe myself to be precontracted as the king himself said. Just as he said: I am not free to marry. Persuade them that it cannot be done. I swear I cannot do it. I will not put my head back on the block and wait to hear the whistle of the falling axe.”

Now, let me see, what do I have now?

I have to say, I’m not doing very well at all.

I have six French hoods edged with gold. I have six pairs of sleeves, six plain kirtles, six gowns; they are in navy blue, black, dark green, and gray. I have no jewels, I have no toys. I don’t even have my kitten. Everything that the king gave me has been taken from my rooms by Sir Thomas Seymour – a Seymour! taking a Howard’s goods! Think how we shall resent that! – to be returned to the king. So, as it turns out, all the things I counted before were never really mine. They were loans and not gifts at all.

I have three rooms with very poor tapestries. My servants live in one, and I live in the other two with my half sister Isabel, Lady Baynton, and two other ladies. None of them speaks to me for resentment at the position they find themselves in through my wickedness, except Isabel, who has been told to bring me to a sense of my sin. I have to say that this makes for very poor company in a confined space. My confessor is ready for my call should I be such a fool as to wish to hang myself by confessing to him what I have denied to everyone else, and twice a day Isabel scolds me as if I were her servant. I have some books of prayers and the Bible. I have some sewing to do, shirts for the poor; but surely they must have enough shirts by now? I have no page boys, or courtiers, or jesters, or musicians, or singers. Even my little dogs have been taken away, and I know they will pine for me.

My friends are all gone. My uncle has disappeared like the mist in the morning, and they tell me that most of my household – Lady Rochford and Francis Dereham, Katherine Tylney and Joan Bulmer, Margaret Morton and Agnes Restwold – are in the Tower being questioned about me.

But even worse than all of this, I heard today that they have taken Thomas Culpepper to the Tower also. My poor, beautiful Thomas! The thought of his being arrested by some ugly man at arms is a horror, but the thought of my Thomas being questioned makes me fall to my knees and lay my face against the rough cloth of my bed and weep. If only we had run away when we first knew that we were in love. If only he had come for me before I even went to court, when I was still a girl at Lambeth. If only I had told him that I was his, only his, when I first came to court, before all of this went wrong.

“Do you want your confessor?” Lady Baynton says coldly as she finds me weeping. They will have told her to say this; they are eager for me to break down and tell everything.

“No,” I say quickly. “I have nothing to confess.”

And what is so horrid is that these rooms are Lady Margaret Douglas’s rooms, where she was kept on her own in silence for the crime of falling in love. Fancy that! She was here, just like me, wandering from one room to the other and back again, under arrest for loving a man, not knowing what the charge could be, nor what the sentence could be, nor when the blow would fall. She was here all on her own, in disgrace for thirteen months, hoping that the king would forgive her, wondering what was going to happen. She was taken away just a few days ago to make room for me – I can’t believe it! – they took her to Kenninghall, where she will be imprisoned again until the king forgives her, if he ever forgives her.

I think of her, a young woman only a little older than me, locked up and alone just like me, imprisoned for the crime of loving a man who loved her back, and I wish now that I had gone down on my knees to the king and begged him to be kind to her. But how was I to know that one day I should be in just the same state? In the very same rooms? Suspected of being a young woman in love, just as she is? I wish I had told him that she is only young and perhaps silly and she should be guided – not arrested and punished. But I didn’t speak up for her, nor did I speak for poor Margaret Pole, nor for all the men and women at Smithfield. I didn’t speak up for the men of the North who rose up against him. I didn’t say a word for Thomas Cromwell, but I got married on the day he died without even a moment of pity. I didn’t speak up for the king’s daughter Princess Mary, but worse: I complained of her. I didn’t even speak up for my own mistress and queen, Anne, whom I loved. I promised her my loyalty and friendship, and yet when they asked me, I signed a paper against her without bothering to read it. And now there is nobody who will go down on their knees and ask for mercy for me.

Of course, I don’t know what is going on. If they have arrested Henry Manox along with Francis Dereham, then he will tell them whatever they want to hear. We did not part on good terms, and he has no love for Francis. He will tell them that he and I were all but lovers, and then he is certain to tell them that I dropped him and went on to Francis Dereham. My name will be quite sullied, and my grandmother will be furious.