George steps across to me and cups my face in his palms. ‘Dearest Jane,’ he says sweetly. ‘Little wife. Get rid of Agnes for us. Do it for love?’

  THAT EVENING, THE king calls for a circle dance: gentlemen in an outer circle, ladies on the inside. The king starts with Anne as his partner and works around the circle, dancing with each lady until he returns to his wife again. Each girl blushes as soon as he takes her hand: a king causes desire with his touch, just as he cures sickness. I feel the heat in my own face at his whispered: ‘Ah, Jane! Pretty Jane! I danced my way all around just to reach you!’

  He is nearly forty-three years old now, but, like everyone else at court, I cannot see his age. He is still handsome: his brown beard curling around his sensual mouth, his dark blue eyes smiling down at me as his warm hand takes mine. For me, for all of us, he will always be the stunningly handsome young boy-king who came to the throne at seventeen, married a Spanish princess for love and swore he would make his kingdom the finest in Europe. He is as light on his feet as he was then. He turns me in the steps of the dance and draws me close. ‘Jane, I swear, if you were not my sister-in-law …’

  I feel a blush in my own cheeks. The king has been the lover of sisters before, he was bedding Mary Boleyn when he fell in love with Anne.

  ‘The queen would have me beheaded!’ I whisper, and he laughs and squeezes my hand, and moves on in the dance.

  Mark Smeaton, the lute player, should be standing with the musicians, but he dances around the outside of the circle and lingers beside Anne, never missing a note.

  The dance takes the king from me to Agnes, and suddenly, she stumbles on her hem, and pitches into his arms. It’s a shameless move from a maid-of-honour, she must be quite determined to capture his attention. Mark slows the cadence of his playing for a moment, and the king whispers something in her ear. She blushes like an innocent girl, recovers her balance, and Mark picks up the tune, and it is as if no one hesitated. The dance moves the king on to his next partner but I see him glance back, as Agnes shakes her head and mouths: ‘I dare not!’ – the very motto of courtly love that he once used about Anne.

  It is evidence enough. When the dance ends with curtseys and bows, I slip from the hall to the queen’s rooms, picking up a jug of warm creamy milk from her serving table as I go past. I tap on the door of the room for the maids-of-honour; but there is no reply. Ten of them sleep here in five comfortable beds. Agnes shares the bed by the door, her prayer book on a little prie-dieu by her bedside, her rosary beside it. Her clothes are in a chest at the bottom of the bed. I pull back the covers and pour milk on the sheets where it will soak through to the bedding and the wool-stuffed mattress beneath. It will smell of sour milk even after they have washed the sheets three times. Her bedfellows will say she pisses the bed and refuse to share with her, their maids will say she smells. She will be horribly shamed.

  That night, I climb into the huge carved bed beside Anne. ‘Did you see her?’ she demands. ‘Did you see him with her?’

  I nod.

  ‘Did you warn her?’

  ‘Milk in her bed.’

  Anne laughs like a young girl. ‘Jane, you are the best of sisters.’

  I laugh, too. This is what it is to be a great courtier – I can stoop to the pettiest of spites or undertake the greatest of embassies. No one but George and I can do both great and small acts for our queen.

  Anne and I sleep curled up together, like loving sisters, and I think: this is the life I wanted – to serve with love and to be treasured for it. This is the family I wanted, when I was sent away from home in childhood. This is the love that I missed then, raised as a courtier and not as a beloved daughter. This is the woman I wanted to be: at the centre of power, serving a woman of power.

  I AM WAKENED BY the clutch of her hand like a vice on my wrist. ‘What?’ I demand, half asleep.

  ‘Get George.’

  ‘What?’ I say stupidly. ‘What?’

  ‘Get up, light the candles and get George, you damned fool,’ Anne says through her teeth, biting back a moan of pain.

  I feel the sheets are wet beneath me; for a moment, in sleepy confusion, I think Agnes has poured milk into our bed in an instant revenge, but when I touch it, my fingers are black in the darkness.

  I light a candle from the embers of the fire and throw back the sheets. Anne is lying in a spreading pool of red.

  ‘Get George!’

  I don’t argue. I throw a robe around my shoulders and dive out through the connecting door to the king’s rooms, run barefoot through the gallery. Our door is unlocked. I cross our hall to our bedroom and shake George’s naked shoulder.

  He rolls over at once. ‘Jane? What is it?’

  With a jolt of horror, I see my hand has left a bloodstain on our sheets. George looks down at it. ‘That’s Anne’s blood,’ I tell him. ‘She’s losing the baby.’

  In one swift movement, he is out of bed, pulling on his shirt, heaving up his breeches. I want him to hold me, but he fends me off.

  ‘Get the midwife,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know where she lives!’

  ‘Then wake my mother,’ he says. ‘Just her. Don’t say a word to anyone else.’

  ‘Wait for me … you can’t go to Anne’s bedroom—’

  But he has already lit a candle and gone through the door so quickly that the flame streams back and shows his handsome face like a mask of fear.

  The Boleyn family rooms are beside ours. I tap on the bright new shield of the three black bulls and the blood red inverted V, and I go in. Beyond the hall is a presence chamber, the privy chamber, and the master bedroom. I tiptoe through the rooms, my bare feet shrinking from the strewing rushes. I tap on the bedroom door and hear the rumbling snore of my father-in-law.

  No one hears my knock. I open the door and peer in.

  My mother-in-law, the Countess of Wiltshire, is lying on her side, facing the door, her eyes closed. Beside her is the mound of my father-in-law, heaped with furs.

  Gently, I touch her shoulder with my clean hand, my bloody fingers behind my back. ‘It’s Anne,’ I whisper. ‘She’s ill.’

  She wakes at once and slips out of bed without disturbing her sleeping husband. Her robe is at the foot of her bed with her Turkey leather slippers.

  ‘The baby?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I do know; but I dare not say. ‘George sent me to wake you and to fetch a midwife.’

  ‘My woman knows where she lives,’ she says. ‘Wake her and tell her to fetch Emily la Leche from her house in Duck Lane. Tell her that it’s you that’s sick, that I said to bring her to you in the queen’s rooms.’

  I see that the Boleyns will give me a dead baby before I get a live one. Elizabeth Boleyn does not wait for me to agree but hurries out. One outflung hand points to the women servants’ door, and then she is gone. She does not take my candle; she goes down the shadowy gallery without a light, as if she can see in darkness like a cat.

  I order the servant, and then I walk on, down the king’s gallery, my candle flame bobbing in the warm draught. Next door to the Boleyns is the bigger suite of rooms allocated to the Duke of Norfolk. Thomas Howard is here alone – estranged from his wife, who stayed faithful to Katherine of Aragon when the rest of us did not. Late as it is, the door opens at once to my quiet tap.

  A servant waits for me to speak.

  ‘Is my lord here?’ I whisper.

  He bows and gestures for me to come inside, closing the great door behind me with a noiseless click. He crosses the big hall to the double doors of a grand bedroom and scratches against the oak panel. It, too, opens at once, and there is Thomas Howard the Duke of Norfolk, in a heavily embroidered night robe, wide awake, his long face grooved with lines, showing no surprise.

  ‘Yes? Jane?’

  I have been his eyes and ears ever since I first arrived at court as a lonely little girl. Thomas Howard was the only one to notice me. He said I was a clever little poppet, and he gave me ribbons when I brought him news. He praised my learning and asked me what the queen had said in Spanish when she was alone with her ambassador, what she whispered in Latin to her confessor. Who came and went through the private door to her rooms? Who was her secret doctor, and why did she summons him?

  When I married George, the duke became my uncle and the head of my house and said I was to think of him as a father, that I must go to him with all my little troubles, with any little secrets. Especially, I must tell him about the queen as the king turned against her and fell in love with my sisters-in-law: first Mary and then Anne.

  I brought him news from the queen’s rooms, trivial gossip at first, and then I learned the number code that the Spanish diplomats used for writing secrets – and I copied her letters. I warned him when his own wife, Elizabeth, the young Duchess of Norfolk, hid a message to the queen in a basket of Seville oranges. The duke took my word against hers and locked her up far from her home and her children. At first, I was horrified that one word from me had destroyed a woman’s life: separated her from her children and made her home into a prison. But I felt proud that a great man like the duke trusted me, a child, more than her. He prized my whispered word above his wife’s denial. I learned a secret, I gave the secret to my patron, and he acted with power. It was as if the power was mine, as if I earned my own power with my secret.

  After that, he trusted me completely. Together, we watched the growth of a Spanish party – a traitorous group formed deep inside the court, with adherents all over the country, financed by Spain and the Roman Catholic Church, linked to many of the old lords, many of the old royal family, sworn to defend the old queen against the king, sworn to restore England to the Papist faith, sworn to restore Lady Mary as the king’s only heir, sworn to the death and destruction of Anne, of all of us.

  ‘What news?’ the duke asks me, knowing it must be terrible news for me to come to him, barefoot in my night robe.

  ‘Anne’s losing the baby,’ I whisper. ‘Her mother, your sister, told me to fetch a midwife.’

  ‘Did she tell you to wake me?’

  ‘No. It’s to be kept secret. Nobody knows I’m here.’

  ‘Well done. Go back to Anne. Tell me when it’s all over. Either way.’

  He shows no sign of distress, though this is the end of a royal Howard baby. But of course it’s not the only chance for him. His daughter is married to the king’s bastard son; he might get a royal Howard baby from them.

  ‘Thank you for coming to me, Jane. I rely on you.’

  I curtsey and turn to the door. The silent servant opens it for me, and I hear the quiet click as it closes behind me. I hurry back through the king’s private door into the queen’s bedroom.

  THE SCENE IN the queen’s bedroom is familiar and vile. I have attended more than one death here, in exactly these rooms, with exactly this sense of unstoppable despair. Then it was Queen Katherine, lying flat on the bed with her legs raised high on a stack of pillows, white as her sheets, mouthing prayers, her rosary clutched in her hand, her eyes on a crucifix. Now it is Anne, holding the newly translated English Bible, her eyes fixed on her brother’s face, both of them whispering the psalm for courage in the valley of death.

  Her mother has Anne swaddled tight, as if bedding stuffed between her legs can hold the baby in place. The blood seeps through the whiteness as George mutters in English: ‘Why, though I shall go in the midst of the shadow of death, I shall not dread evils, for thou art with me, thou art with me, in the midst of the shadow of death, I shall not dread. I shall not dread. Though I shall go in the midst of the shadow of death, I shall not dread evils, for thou art with me.’

  For a long time, there is no sound but the muttered psalm. Light seeps around the joints of the shutters. Then I can hear birdsong, the bubbling, rippling joy of a blackbird. Now, it is so light that the candle flames look yellow and tawdry, and I blow them out. The spreading stain on the sheets is not black in the darkness any more but red as jam; soon the servants will be waking, and someone will try the door and know there has been a night-time vigil over the queen’s bloodstained bed.

  Still, Anne says nothing; her eyes are fixed on George’s dark face as he prays like a priest, and her mother tightens the sheets between her legs.

  I want to hold them both; I want to hold Time itself, so that this dreadful day never dawns, instead I clutch at the bedpost and whisper ‘Amen, Amen,’ to their prayers.

  A mouse-like scratch at the door interrupts us. A servant, half-dressed, whispers: ‘One of the Boleyn servants said this woman was wanted for Lady Rochford …’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, opening the door a crack. ‘Come in.’ I pull the midwife into the room and close the door on the waiting woman and the Boleyn servant.

  ‘This is Lady Rochford,’ Anne’s mother points to Anne. ‘Is she losing her baby?

  The woman takes off her shawl, pulls back the bedding, unwraps the bloodied sheets. There is a sweaty smell of blood and juices.

  ‘She’s not losing it,’ the woman says, and we all look at her, with disbelieving hope in a miracle, as if she has come to save us, to save England itself. Even Anne lifts her head from George’s shoulder.

  ‘Not losing it?’ I whisper.

  ‘She’s lost it already,’ she says with brutal honesty. ‘It’s done. It’s all come away. This here’ – she unwraps the sheet to show a little mess of bloody clots. ‘This was it. Not much to see, and it’s all done. The blood is just the rest of it. She’ll likely stop bleeding in a few weeks.’

  Anne drops her face into the crook of George’s shoulder and neck. He bends around her so they are like one strange creature with two dark heads – an Orthus – sprouting from a tangle of bloodied sheets and one pair of forked naked legs.

  ‘I’m cursed,’ Anne whispers. ‘The queen has cursed me.’

  ‘It’s gone?’ Elizabeth Boleyn confirms coldly. This is not the first time she has sat beside a queen birthing a dead prince. More than once, she has rolled up bloodied sheets with a crowned monogram and burned little messes and thrown the ashes down the jakes.

  ‘Long gone,’ the midwife says.

  ‘But she can get another child?’

  ‘Nothing to stop her if the husband can do his part,’ the woman says agreeably.

  ‘Then stay and clean her up. She has to be up and riding and dancing as soon as she can.’

  ‘Women’s work,’ is all the old woman says, smiling grimly, as if women’s work is well-known to be dancing and riding and conceiving and cleaning up bloodstained sheets and broken hearts. She takes the bloody linen out to the stool room.

  ‘Pay the woman when she’s finished,’ my mother-in-law says to me. ‘And tell her to keep her mouth shut.’

  She turns to go, and sees George and Anne, still entwined. ‘Oh, go to your room, George,’ she orders him with sudden irritability. ‘You shouldn’t be here at all.’

  ‘But what are we to say?’ I ask.

  She pauses in the doorway. ‘We say nothing. We never announced a baby. There was no baby; we never said there was.’

  ‘She told the king.’ I point out quietly, when George and Anne are silent.

  ‘She admits to him that she made a mistake; she missed a course or two, and she hoped … We never say “miscarry”. Nor “dead-birth”. We never say “dead”.’

  ‘I went to France, Lady Mother,’ George points out quietly. ‘I told the King of France that Anne was with child and that we’d visit when he was born.’

  ‘The King of France isn’t going to complain, is he? He’ll be merry as May Day at our grief. But it doesn’t matter what he thinks. What matters is what our king thinks. What matters is that our king never hears the word “miscarry” again. Never hears anyone say his baby was “dead-born”. He heard it enough times from the first wife. He’s never to hear it from Anne.’

  OVER THE NEXT few days, I watch us Boleyns and Howards tell a bold-faced lie and dare anyone to contradict us. I am the key to the cypher of lies, as people whisper questions to me that they would not dare ask Anne’s mother Elizabeth Boleyn, or her uncle Thomas Howard. Again and again, I confide – in strictest confidence – that Anne thought she was with child, but her course was just late, by a month or so: a little mistake, natural to a new wife. The quickest way to spread a story in this court is to swear secrecy.

  The only person with a right to know is the king; and he asks nothing. His court, the reformation of his religion, the revolution in his country – his entire life – is based on the belief that his first wife could not bear him a son because their marriage was invalid and so not blessed by God. His new marriage is valid, ergo it is blessed by God, ergo he will have a son. It is a matter of logic: the king’s own brand of logic that cannot be denied. Whatever happened to Anne (and we all stoutly maintain that nothing happened), the king’s seed cannot fail. Since the perfect king has a perfect wife, he is bound to get a perfect son on her.

  Gertrude Courtenay pays us another unwanted visit, and I manage to talk for half an hour without deviating from our lie. Everything I say will be on the desk of the Spanish ambassador within an hour and read in Toledo within the month. She tries to make me admit it was a deadbirth, and I widen my limpid grey eyes and say that a young wife, a young mother, is apt to make mistakes and that next time there will be no mistake and there will be a boy. Gertrude Courtenay can take that back to the Spanish ambassador, the old lords, and the hidden Papists. She can tell it to the West Country that her family commands as if it were their fiefdom; she can whisper it to the Lady Mary and write it to the old queen. It makes no difference if the Spanish party believe our lie or not. There is a new law of England – Anne’s law, passed by Anne’s parliament – that says that Anne is queen and her son will be the next king. Whether her son comes this year or next, that is still the law.

  Anne rises up from her bed in days. She dines with the court, keeps the king in a ripple of laughter, dances with him, smiling into his warm face, and praises him for the reforms he is proposing for the Church, and no one remarks that her belly was rounded and now it is flat.