We have to wait, standing about, one or two with sewing still in their hands. Jane Seymour takes a seat by the window. She closes the book as if she knows she will not read any more today and folds her hands, her head bent as if she is praying. Something about her snags my attention; she is oddly serene, when the rest of us are flustered.

  We wait. Nobody even wonders aloud what is happening inside Anne’s presence chamber. Nobody even whispers, we are all straining to hear through the thick doors. There is the rumble of angry male voices, again and again, as if they are asking questions, and we can’t hear more than her short retort. It sounds like an argument – but the council cannot argue with a crowned queen. One thing is for sure: they are not begging her to accept a regency.

  Then there is a quick tap on the door, and the yeomen fling the doors open, and Anne is standing before them, her face quite blank, her eyes quite black, the lords half a pace behind her.

  ‘Her Grace’s cloak,’ my uncle the Duke of Norfolk snaps at me, and I run through the presence chamber to her bedroom to fetch it, as if I were a chamberer.

  By the time I am back with it, they are gone: my uncle Thomas Howard; John de Vere; William Sandys, lord chamberlain of the household; and Anne, my sister – gone with three men who hate her. But where have they gone?

  ‘To the barge,’ Margery Horsman says to me.

  I turn from her and run down the little stone stair to the garden and the pier, and she trots beside me, as if she is helping; but really to see what is going to happen next.

  By the time we arrive at the pier, they have handed Anne into the royal barge; she is sitting in state, on the throne at the back, her uncle beside her, and the other two men are ashore, waiting for the cloak. They take it from me on the riverbank; I make a little gesture to the frozen figure on the chair.

  ‘Don’t I go with her?’ I ask John de Vere. ‘What about her ladies?’

  ‘You don’t want to go with her!’ he says, laughing as if this is a great joke. He takes the cloak from me, strides up the gangplank, and they run it on board and cast off.

  Margery and I stand on the pier and watch the oarsmen take up the rhythm of the drumbeats and row to the middle of the river, where the flow of the stream catches it, and the barge picks up speed and goes rapidly upstream on the incoming tide. Anne hasn’t moved an inch; and though they have her cape, she has not put it on.

  I am the chief lady-in-waiting; but I have no idea what I should do. George is at Whitehall Palace with the king; Anne has gone upriver – I assume she is summoned to join them; but nobody knows. I look at Margery Horsman and see a blank fear in her face that I must wipe from my own as we go back inside to the queen’s rooms.

  ‘Well, you can get on with the shirts for the poor, at any rate,’ I say in a weak attempt at discipline, and I wave the ladies and the maids back into the presence chamber, but one by one, they put down their work and slip away, and I know they are going to tell their patron or their mother or their spymaster that the lord chamberlain has taken the queen upriver to London, without a companion and with nothing but her cloak. Jane Seymour did not even wait for me to come back from the riverbank – she was gone from her seat in the window when I returned from the pier.

  I leave the younger maids sewing with Margery Horsman, and I go through the bedroom door to the king’s side to see if George has returned. Our room is empty; the bed has not been slept in. It doesn’t even look like our room, where we have lived, husband and wife, for eleven years. It looks like a stranger’s room, readied for strangers, with a chill tidiness about it, as if the room itself is waiting for someone who will not come, someone who will never come again.

  I go down the gallery to the Howard rooms and tap on the door. The usual manservant answers, and he knows perfectly well who I am; but today he pretends not to know me and does not admit me.

  ‘When is His Grace returning?’ I ask at the threshold, peering over his shoulder into the hall.

  He bows. ‘His Grace did not say.’

  I turn from him as if it does not matter at all. ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘He did not tell me, your ladyship.’

  I walk down the king’s gallery and down the little stairs past Cromwell’s dark chamber to the stable-yard. At least here, everything is normal. The grooms are filling their buckets at the well, someone is whistling while mucking-out, and three horses are saddled and waiting for their riders. George’s horses are in their usual stall, and the groom is brushing one of them down.

  ‘Get ready to go to Whitehall Palace,’ I say. ‘I’ll give you a note for your master. You can take a wherry.’

  He nods, and I step into the office of the master groom, where there is a desk with pen and paper for sending orders to the corn merchants and hay farmers. I take up a blunt pen and dip it in the sticky ink and write:

  Our sister has gone by barge upstream with our uncle and others of the council. Please write what I should do. J

  If it falls into the wrong hands, it is not incriminating in any way – nor does it even identify us Boleyns. I cannot think why I am worrying about this simple note. I add another line.

  Don’t fail to reply.

  And then I give it to the groom and send him on his way with a sixpence.

  It is the strangest evening. We dine in the queen’s presence chamber; nobody talks above a whisper at dinner, and though the tables are laid with cards after we have eaten, and the servants are pouring wine, no one plays or laughs. The musicians thump out dances by rote, with their eyes on us; but nobody stands up. The men dine on the king’s side and visit us, after they have eaten, aimlessly, as if they have nothing else to do. When they see Anne’s empty chair, they go quietly away again. Everyone looks at me, as if I must know what is happening, and I turn up my mouth in a false smile and look around as if I am ready to be amused; but I know nothing, and George has not replied to my message.

  I even get hold of Jane Seymour, who reappears, blank as vellum, and I ask her where has she been all day, and if she knows when the king is coming back? She shakes her fair head and looks at me with her grey-blue eyes and says that her brothers needed her for family business and that she knows nothing.

  I sleep in my own quiet room, in my marriage bed, restless, hoping that George will return in the night, having sailed home to me on the ebb tide. But he does not come.

  WHEN I WAKE early in the warm sunshine of a May morning, I throw a robe over my shift and go through the little door to Anne’s bedroom. It is empty; she is not back either. I cannot think where she might be, nor what she can be doing without me, without her ladies.

  As I am standing helplessly before her chest of gowns, wondering what she has at Whitehall and what she will need, there is a knock on the door of the privy chamber outside. I leave her bedroom and cross the privy chamber.

  ‘Yes?’ I snap.

  ‘The Boleyn groom for Lady Rochford,’ the guard says outside the door.

  I open the door, and there is my groom, and in his hand is my letter to George.

  ‘Why didn’t you give it to him?’

  ‘He wasn’t there.’ His face is set in the same expressionless mask that we are all wearing. ‘I went to his rooms at Whitehall Palace, and he was already gone. His horse was in the stables where he left it – he went by barge.’

  ‘But our barge is here? Whose barge did he take? And where’s he gone now?’

  ‘It was an unmarked barge,’ he says very quietly. ‘An unmarked barge with no standards. It took him to the Tower. Him, and Henry Norris with him.’

  This means nothing; I need fear nothing. The Tower is a royal palace; we have our own rooms there.

  ‘Henry Norris went, too? With my husband in the barge? As good company?’

  He spreads his hands as if to tell me it was not a pleasure trip, but he does not contradict me.

  ‘Good company. Very well,’ I say as calmly as I can; my voice trembles, and I clear my throat. ‘Don’t gossip of this in the stables. It’s probably just a game of the king’s. You know how he loves disguising and surprises. It’ll be a masque – a May Day masque.’

  He nods uncertainly.

  I tuck my note to George in my pocket to burn later, and I go back to my own rooms to dress. Foolishly, I hesitate over the chest of clothes, and when my maid comes in, I don’t know what I should wear. I don’t know what I am doing today. I don’t know if I should dress prettily, for a May dinner in the greening woods, or warmly, for the barge to the Tower. My head hammers as if I have a fever. I cannot decide on my gown; everything whirls past my eyes. I keep seeing Henry Norris’ horse backing and nobody able to make it go forward.

  When I am dressed and walk stiffly into the queen’s presence chamber, there are just a few of the ladies – and half of them disloyal – stitching shirts for the poor. As if they care about the poor! I look around at the missing places.

  ‘Where’s Jane?’ I demand. ‘Where’s Jane Seymour?’

  Margery Horsman looks up. ‘She’s gone. She’s gone with Sir Nicholas Carew to Beddington.’

  Everyone looks blank, as if a maid-of-honour is allowed to leave her post, go off with a courtier, without a word to the mistress of the maids or the chief lady-in-waiting. As if Nicholas Carew can command a maid in the queen’s service. As if he is a courtier of any importance. Carew Manor at Beddington is his family house. He has taken Jane Seymour from her hard-won place in the queen’s rooms; he has taken her out of court without permission and without notice. And Jane is not the only one missing.

  ‘And where are the others?’ I look round. ‘Who isn’t here? Elizabeth Somerset, Lady Worcester? Anne Braye, Lady Cobham?’

  ‘The privy council sent for them,’ Margery Horsman tells me. Everyone has their heads bowed low over their sewing, as if they are afraid that if they look up from their work, they, too, will be summonsed.

  ‘What for?’ I ask.

  ‘They said there is an inquiry.’

  ‘Oh, that inquiry,’ I say confidently. ‘Yes, I know all about the inquiry.’

  I walk confidently towards the door, and the yeomen of the guard swings it open for me without hesitation. I go down the stair to Thomas Cromwell’s dark chamber, and I tap on the first and then the second of the double doors. He is not there; but his clerk is carefully sorting papers, deeds of lands into separate piles. When he sees me, he turns the deeds face down, as if to hide the names of the owners, and bows.

  ‘Lady Rochford.’

  ‘Where’s Master Cromwell?’

  ‘I don’t know, your ladyship.’

  ‘He told me that he was going home to Stepney for May Day?’

  ‘He was leaving home as I came here.’

  ‘By horse? Going to join the king at Whitehall Palace? By barge? Has he gone to the Tower?’

  ‘I don’t know, your ladyship. I don’t know where he is.’

  I come a little closer. ‘I have to tell him something important.’

  ‘Would you write it for him? I am going home to Stepney shortly; I can carry a message.’

  This is no help to me, for I have nothing to tell him – unless he does not know that Anne has gone from court and that George has gone to the Tower, Jane Seymour to Beddington, and Lady Worcester and Lady Cobham to the inquiry. But surely, he must know this? The council could not act without his knowledge.

  ‘I’ll write to him,’ I decide.

  He gives me a sheet of paper and a needle and thread, a knife, a pen and sealing wax, but I have no time to make a letterlock. I write what anyone can read:

  Sir,

  As you may know, the council has taken Anne in a barge to London? I believe that my husband has been taken to the Tower. Please tell me if I should join them, and how long a stay they will make so that I can send their clothes? Should I attend the queen?

  Yours aye,

  JB

  ‘Don’t give it to anyone else but your master,’ I tell him. He bows. He is of the Cromwell household; he would never give anything to anyone but Cromwell.

  I cannot go back to the queen’s rooms and the frightened women sewing shirts. Instead, I go to the king’s side and knock on the door of the Boleyn rooms. I stare at the bright newly painted heraldic shield, the three black bulls and the red inverted chevron, before the door opens and the groom of the household bows to me.

  ‘Is Lord Wiltshire here?’ I ask.

  ‘No, your ladyship. He is at Westminster.’

  ‘Do you expect him home tonight?’

  ‘No, your ladyship; he is lodging with the other lords at Westminster Palace.’

  I nod as if this is what I expected and go down the gallery to my own rooms, the Rochford rooms. I don’t know what else I can do. If Anne’s father is at Westminster, sitting with the other lords on the inquiry, then he will be guarding the family interest: his son George and his daughter Anne. I have nothing to worry about, since all four of our allies: my mentor Cromwell, my father, George’s father, and even our uncle Thomas Howard, are judges on the inquiry. It is packed in our favour, and I don’t even know the subject. I have nothing to fear.

  It’s not yet noon, and I am as tired as if I have been up all night watching for an enemy from the tower of a besieged castle. But I don’t know who the enemy is, and I don’t know who is in the castle and who is without.

  I GO ON KNOWING nothing all day and all night until the next day, when Thomas Cromwell comes back to Greenwich alone, without the king, or George, or my father, or the other lords. But my heart leaps to see the familiar big cob horse in his stall, and at the end of the day, I wait for my spymaster at the door to the stable.

  ‘You startled me,’ he says as I step out of the early evening dusk.

  I know I did not. ‘I wrote to you yesterday. I asked you what I should do.’

  ‘I could not then tell you. I was as much in the dark as you are.’

  ‘Not in the dark now,’ I observe.

  He nods. ‘But there is great darkness,’ he says piously.

  I feel a wave of impatience, like a disregarded daughter. ‘Master Cromwell, if I am to work for you then I have to know what is happening, to avoid accidental error.’

  He smiles. ‘I am sure you would make no error, Lady Rochford. You have already been very helpful. Matters moved rather swiftly and unexpectedly; but I can tell you everything now.’

  I know he will never tell me everything. ‘Where is my husband?’

  ‘At the Tower. He is under arrest.’

  I gasp and put my hands behind my back, my palms flat against the roughness of the bricks, as if I need the walls themselves to support me. ‘And Anne?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘What for? What for?’

  He clears his throat. ‘As I say, it has become rather complicated. I was instructed by the king to set up an inquiry into the validity of the royal marriage. Obeying his command, I summoned reputable lords – your father one of them – to rule that the king is in forbidden intimacy with the sister of his former lover. As everyone knows, he married Queen Anne though he was her sister Mary Boleyn’s lover, and so he has offended God.’

  ‘They got a dispensation from the pope,’ I point out.

  ‘Yes. But – remember? – the pope has no authority to give a dispensation in England. And two dead-borns are proof to the king that the marriage is an offence to God.’

  ‘One,’ I maintain stubbornly. ‘Only one.’

  ‘Two,’ he says gently. ‘One was wrongly denied.’

  I am silent; he meets my eyes as guileless as a child.

  ‘This is superstitio – a belief standing over a fact,’ I tell him.

  ‘But it is the king’s superstitio. And the king’s belief comes from God Himself.’

  ‘Like Moses?’

  Thomas Cromwell hides his smile in a nod. ‘God speaks to the king and that overrules everything, even the facts as we – er, lesser men – might think them.’

  For a moment, I could almost laugh. Here are Thomas Cromwell and Lord Morley’s scholarly daughter agreeing that Henry Tudor’s fears are more true than reality. This is to take courtier work to an extreme. But these are extreme times.

  ‘Oh, that’s why they were singing the old song of Henry Percy’s betrothal to Anne!’ I exclaim, as this part of the puzzle falls into place. ‘To discredit her marriage to the king.’ Suddenly, it is all clear to me. ‘Master Cromwell – this is the work of the Spanish party! Francis Bryan insulted Anne to her face – called her Henry Percy’s leavings. It was the very day they got the Garter for Nicholas Carew! They have been stirring up the king to think his marriage invalid – they must be telling him there was no dispensation for his affair with Mary Boleyn and that Anne was married to Henry Percy.’

  From his silence, I know I am right.

  ‘And that’s why you were meeting Dr Sampson: to prove invalidity!’ I say triumphantly. ‘I saw him outside your door that day. Dr Sampson advised the first marriage, Katherine of Aragon’s marriage was invalid. Now you’ve brought him back to deny this one.’

  He nods, saying nothing.

  ‘The Spanish party has persuaded the king that his marriage is invalid,’ I say slowly. ‘And you have set up an inquiry into it.’ I enjoy the step by step of the discovery; but I know that this is a path that winds to the end of the Boleyns. ‘Master Cromwell – I cannot believe you are siding with the Spanish—’

  ‘Obeying the king,’ he interjects.

  ‘—siding with the Spanish to say that Anne is not a valid wife and so she is not queen?’

  ‘Alas, since the king knows it from God, there can be no denying.’

  ‘But what about the oaths? All of England swore that she was the one and only wife and queen. You swore it! I did! Why did Sir Thomas More die if Anne is not the only wife and queen?’

  ‘He died for denying that the king is supreme. Nobody can deny that.’