She has started her reign with a terrible error. Lady Margaret Douglas should never have been allowed to meet in secret with Tom Howard. Mary Howard, the young duchess married to Henry Fitzroy, should never have been allowed to encourage them. Queen Jane, stepping up to a throne which was still warm from the frightened sweat of the last incumbent, dazzled by her own rise, did not watch the behavior of her new court, did not know what was happening. But now Tom is in the Tower charged with treason and Lady Margaret is confined to her rooms and the king is furious with everyone.

“No, she’s arrested, she’s in the Tower too,” Jane Boleyn tells me cheerfully.

I feel the familiar plummet of my heart at the thought of the Tower. “Lady Margaret? On what charge?”

“Treason.”

That word, from Jane Boleyn, is like a sentence of death.

“How can she be charged with treason when all she did was marry a young man for love?” I ask reasonably. “Folly, yes. Disobedience, yes. And of course the king is offended. Rightly so. But how is it treason?”

Jane Boleyn lowers her eyes. “It’s treason if the king says it is so,” she states. “And he says they are guilty. And the punishment is death.”

I am badly shaken. If the king can accuse his beloved niece of treason and put her in the Tower under a sentence of death, he can certainly charge his daughter too. Especially when he calls her his bastard daughter and sends his worst men to threaten her with violence. I am going to the king’s rooms to confer with Montague when I hear the tramp of soldiers’ feet behind me.

For a moment I think I will faint with fear, and I flinch back against the wall and feel the cold stone, cold as a cell in the Tower, against my back. I wait, my heart pounding as they go by, two dozen yeomen of the guard in the bright Tudor livery, marching in step through the corridors of Greenwich Palace heading to the king’s presence chamber.

As soon as they are past me, I am afraid for Montague. I breathe: “My son,” and I go quickly behind the soldiers as they tramp up the stairs to the king’s rooms where the great door to the presence chamber swings open and they go in, two abreast, menacingly strong.

The room is crowded but the king is not there. The throne is empty; he is inside, in his privy chamber, the door closed on his court. He will not witness the arrest. If there are cries and weeping, he will not be disturbed. As I look round the busy room, I see with relief that Montague is not here either; he is probably inside with the king.

The soldiers are not here for my son. Instead, the officer walks confidently to Sir Anthony Browne, the king’s favorite, his trusted Master of Horse, and asks him, politely enough, to come with them. Anthony gets to his feet from where he has been lounging at the window, smiles like the courtier he is, and asks negligently: “Why, whatever is the charge?”

“Treason,” comes the quiet reply, and everyone who is near to Anthony seems to melt away.

The officer looks around a court that is suddenly stunned into shocked silence. “Sir Francis Bryan!” he calls.

“Here,” Sir Francis says. He steps forward, and the men he was with slide back, as if they do not know him now, as if they have never known him. He smiles, his black eye patch looking blindly around the court and seeing no friends. “How may I be of service to you, Officer? Do you need my assistance?”

“You may come with me,” the officer says with a sort of grim humor. “For you are under arrest also.”

“I?” Francis Bryan says, cousin to this queen, cousin to the former queen, a man secure in royal favor after years of friendship. “For what? On what possible charge?”

“Treason,” the man says for the second time. “Treason.”

I watch the two men go out with the guard, and I find the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, at my elbow. “What can they possibly have done?” I ask. Bryan in particular has survived a thousand dangers, having been exiled from court at least twice and returned unscathed each time.

“I’m glad that you don’t know,” comes the threatening reply. “They have been conspiring with Lady Mary, the king’s bastard daughter. They have been plotting to get her out of Hunsdon and, by ship, away to Flanders. I would have them hanged for it. I would see her hanged for it.”

I go back to the queen’s rooms, fear snapping at my heels all the way. The ladies ask me what is happening and I tell them I have seen the arrest of two of the king’s firmest friends. I don’t tell them what the Duke of Norfolk said. I am too afraid to say the words. Lady Woods tells me that my kinsman Henry Courtenay has been dismissed from the Privy Council under suspicion of plotting for the princess. I give as good a performance as I can manage of a woman shocked by extraordinary news.

“Don’t you write to Lady Mary?” Lady Woods says. “Don’t you stay in touch with her? Your former charge? Though everyone knows that you love her and came back to court to serve her?”

“I write to her only through Lord Cromwell,” I say. “I have an affection for her, of course. I write with the queen.”

“But you don’t encourage her?”

I glance across the room. Jane Boleyn is holding herself very still over her sewing, quite as if she is not thinking about her sewing at all. “Of course not,” I say. “I took the oath like everyone else.”

“Not quite everyone,” Jane volunteers, looking up from her work. “Your son Reginald left England without swearing it.”

“My son Reginald is preparing a report for the king on the marriage of Queen Katherine and the governance of the Church of England,” I say firmly. “The king himself has commissioned it, and Reginald is going to reply. He is a scholar for the king, as he was raised to be. He is working for him. His loyalty cannot be questioned, and nor can mine.”

“Oh, of course,” Jane says with a little smile, bending her head to her work. “I didn’t mean to suggest anything other.”

I see Montague at dinner but I cannot easily speak with him until the tables are cleared away and the music starts for dancing. The king seems to be happy as he watches Jane dance with her ladies, and then, when they beg him, he rises to his feet and invites one of the pretty new girls to dance with him.