“Do you curse me?” he pants, all white and sweating, shaking with the knowledge that his house is already cursed for the putting down of Cowdray Priory, cursed by fire and water.

I shake my head. “Of course not. I don’t believe in such nonsense. You make your own destiny. But when you bear false witness against a good man like my son, when you put me to the question, when you know that I have done no wrong, you are on the side of the evil in the world and your friend and ally will draw you close.”

Mabel comes to taunt me with the full list of deaths. George Croftes, John Collins, and Hugh Holland have been hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, their heads set on London Bridge. My son Montague, my precious son and heir, was beheaded on Tower Hill, his cousins Henry Courtenay and Edward Neville followed him to the scaffold and the axe.

“Dead like traitors,” she says.

“Death instead of evidence,” I reply.

I pray for Montague’s children, his son, Harry, safe with his mother at Bockmer, his daughters Katherine and Winifred, who have come with me to this miserable vigil, and more than anyone else I pray for Geoffrey, who has brought us to this tragedy and will—for I know my son—be wishing himself dead tonight.