Elizabeth Somerset, the Countess of Worcester, who attended the queen’s funeral with me at Peterborough, has turned against her friend Anne and provides a report of flirtations and worse in the queen’s bedchamber. Someone speaks of something that someone said on their deathbed. It is a mess of petty gossip and grotesque scandal.

Montague comes home, his face dark and angry. “The shame of it,” he says shortly. “The king says that he believes that up to a hundred men have had her. The disgrace.”

I hand him a glass of mulled ale, while I watch him. “Did you say ‘guilty’?” I ask him.

“I did,” he says. “The evidence was inarguable. Lord Cromwell had every detail that one might question. For some reason, which is beyond me, he allowed George Boleyn himself to tell the court out loud that the king was incapable of fathering a child. He announced the king’s impotency.”

“Did they prove that she murdered our queen?”

“They accused her of it. Seems that’s enough.”

“Will he imprison her? Or send her to a nunnery?”

Montague turns to me and his face is filled with a dark pity. “No. He’s going to kill her.”

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, MAY 1536

Some of this is done: the marriage is annulled, the child Elizabeth declared a bastard. And yet still the woman is kept in the Tower and the plans for an execution go on.

I am glad to be away from the city but I cannot put the woman in the Tower out of my mind. In the closed and derelict priory I go into the cold chapel and kneel on the stone floor facing east, though the beautiful cross and altar silverware have been taken away. I find myself praying to an empty altar for the woman whom I have hated, whose agent stole my holy things.

There is no precedent for the execution of a Queen of England. It is not possible for a queen to be beheaded. No woman has ever walked from the Tower to the little patch of grass before the chapel to her death. I cannot imagine it. I cannot bear to imagine it. And I cannot believe that Henry Tudor, the prince whom I knew, could turn against a woman he had loved like this. He is a king whose courtly lovemaking is a byword at his court. He cannot be brutal; it is always love, true love, for Henry. Surely, he cannot sentence his wife, and the mother of his child, to death. I know that he turned against his own good queen, that he sent her away and neglected her. But it is a different thing, a different thing altogether, to ride away from a disappointing woman and ignore her, than to change overnight and command a lover’s death.

I pray for Anne, but I find my thoughts turning again and again to the king. I think he must be in a fury of jealous rage, shamed at what men are saying about him, exposed by the spiteful wit of the Boleyns, feeling his age, feeling the good looks of his youth blurred by the fatness of his face. Every day he must look in his mirror and see the young, handsome prince disappearing behind the bloated face of an old, laughable king, the golden child becoming the Moldwarp. Everyone adored Henry when he was a young king; he cannot understand that his court, the wife whom he raised from nothing, could have turned against him and—worse—laughed at him as a fat old cuckold.

But I am mistaken in this. While I think of the sensitive man recoiling with shame, raging at the loss of the woman for whom he destroyed so much, Henry is repairing his pride, courting the Seymour girl. He is not looking in the mirror and mourning his youth. He is going upriver in his barge with lute players twanging away, to dine with her every night. He is sending her little gifts and planning their future as if they are a bride and groom betrothed in May. He is not mourning his youth, he is reclaiming it; and just a few days after the cannon shot from the Tower tells all of London that the king has committed one of the worst crimes a man can do—killed his wife—the king marries again and we have a new queen: Jane.

“The Spanish ambassador told me that Jane will bring the princess to court, and see her honored,” Geoffrey tells me. We are walking in the fields towards Home Farm, looking at the greening crop. Somewhere among the white hawthorn of the hedgerow there is a blackbird singing defiance to the world, lilting notes, filled with hope.

“Really?”

Geoffrey is beaming. “Our enemy is dead, and we have survived. The king himself called Henry Fitzroy to him, took him in his arms, and said that the Boleyn woman would have killed him and our princess, and that he was lucky to still have them.”

“He’ll send for the princess?”

“As soon as Jane is proclaimed queen, and sets up her household. Our princess will live with her new mother, the queen—within days.”

I tuck my hand in the crook of my favorite son’s arm and rest my head briefly on his shoulder. “You know, in a life of such reverses, I find I am almost surprised to still be here. I am very surprised to see it all coming right again.”

He pats my hand. “Who knows? You might yet see your beloved princess crowned.”

“Shh, shh,” I say, though the fields are empty but for a distant laborer digging out a blocked ditch. It is now treason even to speak of the death of the king. Every day Cromwell makes a new law to protect the king’s reputation.