‘There are one or two missing,’ I warn her. ‘Lady Mary has gone to join the household of Prince Edward.’

  She looks aghast. ‘She’s run away from me?’

  ‘Just a visit to her brother,’ I say. ‘And it’s not as if you like her. You wouldn’t have wanted her in your rooms, with the privy council coming in. And she’d be no use – she’d be scared to death of them. Remember, they nearly arrested her for not signing the oath, and your uncle said he would bang her head against the wall.’

  She brightens. ‘Oh, did he? How funny! My uncle will come with them?’

  I think of him, bent over his hunter’s neck, riding out to meet the king somewhere in the forest. ‘I don’t know exactly who’s coming,’ I say cautiously.

  ‘Do I curtsey?’

  ‘They bow to you; you don’t get up.’

  She nods her head repeatedly, like it is on a spring: nod, nod, nod. ‘I don’t get up,’ she repeats.

  As soon as I have Kitty on her throne in her presence chamber, I glance out of the window. There is no black barge without a standard on the flagpole, waiting in silence, with the gangplank run ashore. It is different this time. They are not going to tell me to fetch Kitty’s cape as she will feel the cold on the water. She is not going to be taken from her palace. It is different this time.

  When they come, our uncle is among them, and I think this will help our case: the last thing the old duke wants is another Howard girl accused of unchastity – especially lovemaking under the beaky nose of his own stepmother in the family home. And Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk has married a young woman who was betrothed to his son: he is predisposed to dismiss scandal, having been alongside it all his life. Bishop Gardiner, the churchman who hates reform, will be in favour of Kitty, who has no interest in religion; Thomas Audley, the lord chancellor, is a clever lawyer who will argue whatever the king wants as if it was Bible truth; and Archbishop Cranmer is a gentle reformer who would have saved Anne if he could. No one here can be thought of as a friend, but none of them are our enemies.

  Kitty sits in her chair under the canopy with us ladies on either side, in her blue gown, looking very young and small but on her dignity. Always conscious of her appearance, she has taken my hint to be queenly, and her head is poised under her jewelled hood.

  Thomas Cranmer speaks to her gently, respectfully. He says that Francis Dereham has made allegations which suggest that he behaved to her as a husband – did they exchange promises and court, when she was a girl?

  ‘No,’ Kitty says, widening her eyes. ‘No. That’s not true.’

  Cranmer ignores this flat denial, so he must have evidence against her word. I am standing in frozen silence; but I listen intently to Cranmer’s questions, like a scholar tracing the source of a quotation. I am the daughter of a translator: I think about sources, I am a spy; I can hear a voice behind the words, and identify him.

  Clearly, they have interviewed Dereham himself, but also, I think I hear the echo of gossip from some maid in the old duchess’ household. I am sure it is a woman who has told them the detail of kissing and late-night parties in the maids’ rooms. Francis Dereham, boasting or fearful, would have forgotten strawberries and midnight feasts, but this girl remembers it vividly.

  They say nothing about the damning evidence of the purse of a hundred pounds, and – absurdly, incompetently – they don’t seem to realise that Dereham has been working in the queen’s household under their noble noses, for the last month. This sounds like an old song, half-forgotten, that someone has sung to the archbishop in late-blooming autumn malice. He says nothing about Kitty’s behaviour as queen. There’s nothing against Dereham after he left for Ireland; there’s nothing against Kitty since her marriage. Best of all, there is no suggestion of adultery against the king.

  Standing impassively at her shoulder, I keep an expression of attentive concern on my face; but inwardly, I am grinning like a mask of Thalia. All they have is spiteful old gossip, nothing to set in the scale against the king’s massive vanity. He will have told them to make a proper inquiry and clear Kitty’s name. This is what they are doing. We are safe. This is going to be all right.

  ‘None of this is true at all,’ Kitty says clearly. ‘And besides, my grandmother is very strict, and she agreed to my marriage to the king. How could such a thing be true?’

  I note my uncle grimace as Kitty invokes the dowager duchess and drags in our family dignity; but none of them have any appetite to pursue the question or answer it.

  ‘And where is my husband?’ Kitty demands indignantly. ‘Is he back from hunting? Does he know that you are asking these questions of me?’

  ‘His Majesty has gone to Whitehall,’ Thomas Cranmer says gently. ‘He asked us to inquire.’

  ‘He will have asked you to inquire into the wicked people who are making up these lies!’ Kitty says, brilliant in her indignation. ‘He would never have asked you to say them as true! What d’you think he will say when I tell him that you have brought these lies to me, said them to my face, in front of my ladies-in-waiting? That you have upset me? That you made me cry? Don’t you think he will be angry?’

  I see from the hidden anguish on Thomas Cranmer’s face that he is very sure that the king will be angry, and whether or not they find any mud that sticks, the king won’t thank them for this work. He has not told them – as he twice told Lord Cromwell – to get a marriage dissolved at any price and get rid of the unwanted wife.

  I imagine they’ve had very ambivalent instructions: he will have told them to leave no stone unturned to find the truth; but they know well enough that the only truth the king wants to hear, is the one he believes already. Their task is to find out what he believes, and prove it as incontrovertible fact.

  They mutter urgently among themselves, and then they apologise to the queen for disturbing her in her rooms, and they bow themselves out.

  Kitty, flushed with triumph, turns to her ladies. ‘They’re shitting themselves,’ she says, and the young maids scream with laughter.

  THE NEXT DAY, Thomas Cranmer comes back again after breakfast to speak to Kitty and takes a seat beside her at the head of the table, like the father of a family, while the rest of us nibble sweetmeats at the far end and pretend we are not straining to listen. He does not look much like a man who is shitting himself: he looks like a kind old grandfather who is ready to hear a confession. I cannot think how to signal to Kitty that she should trust this kindness no more than the most frightening men of the kingdom who tried to bully her yesterday; but then I see her talking earnestly to him, and his whispered replies, and I think: not to worry – she will wrap him around her little finger.

  At first, she has him dancing to her tune; but then I see him get graver and quieter, and now Kitty seems to be stumbling as she speaks, and now she is more and more distressed, and I can tell that she is frightened. I beckon to one of the youngest maids-of-honour.

  ‘Go ask the queen if she wants some wine and water,’ I tell her.

  She looks across the room. ‘I don’t dare, Lady Rochford,’ she says. ‘He’s raking her over.’

  She’s right. Thomas Cranmer is no longer grandfatherly; but has become the terror he can be in the pulpit. His fluffy white hair is standing on end, his bright-brown eyes never leave her face, and I can see him speaking urgently, insisting, overbearing.

  Kitty blushes hot scarlet, and then she bursts into tears.

  It is agony watching her being bullied into saying things that might damage her. She cries more and more, mopping her flushed face on her priceless sleeves and on her table handkerchief, and he does not give her a moment’s pause but still goes on speaking, low-voiced, until she slides from her chair at the head of the table and collapses onto the floor in floods of tears.

  Now I can interrupt, and I go forward to help her up, and he stops, gets to his feet, puts his hand with the great ruby signet ring on her head, and he blesses her and leaves her, the Queen of England, on the floor of her own presence chamber.

  I had hoped that she was playacting despair; but even when he has gone, she continues to cry bitterly, her breath catching, her sobs getting louder. Her wet face is in the strewing rushes; she throws off her cream and pearl hood and spreads herself on the floor in a frenzy of distress.

  She is not pretending. Over and over again, she says: ‘My husband the king!’ but nothing else is clear. At any rate, I think, nobody can say that she has confessed anything, for she is quite beyond speech.

  I take her head onto my lap to let her have her cry, and I see, from the corner of my eye, the door close behind the skirt of a gown. Someone has gone running to tell their spymaster that the queen has collapsed in tears.

  Isabel Baynton, her sister, gets awkwardly gets to her feet. ‘I’d better tell my husband.’

  ‘Tell him that she will die of grief if they try rough handling,’ I say over her weeping. ‘Who could doubt her innocence? Her heart is breaking at these questions. Tell him that they will have her death on their conscience. She is too fine and too pure to be accused of anything base. Ask him how they will answer to the king if they kill her?’

  I see the tiny gleam of understanding, and she nods and goes out. I think – they’ll never dare to push the king’s little sweetheart into collapse. They have had a denial to their faces. Cranmer has frightened her into uncontrollable weeping, and none of this is evidence.

  I raise her from the floor, still crying, and take her to her bedroom, sit her in a chair by the fire and dry her face and pat her hands with lavender water, as if she has fallen from a horse and is still shaken.

  After about an hour of this quiet petting, there is a knock at the door, and it is Archbishop Cranmer again.

  I try to refuse him, saying she is too distressed, but he insists on coming in, and Sir Edward Baynton is nowhere to be found to refuse him. So Kitty emerges from her bedroom, her hair tumbled down, still weeping, and Cranmer sits beside her, at the fireside in her privy chamber, and whispers in her ear.

  I try to intercept, but he looks mildly at me with his gentle smile and says: ‘I will not distress your royal mistress again, Lady Rochford. I am come to bring her comfort and promise that His Majesty will be graciously kind to her if she confesses the truth. Please leave us.’

  With no support from her sister and no senior ladies-in-waiting to refuse him, I have to wait with her ladies in her presence chamber, hearing sounds of comfort and reassurance. But I think: nobody could accuse her; nobody who sees her in this despair could doubt her innocence. Even I believe in her innocence, and I held the purse that Dereham gave her in my safekeeping!

  They stay together for the rest of the day, though the archbishop goes to the great hall for his dinner, and Kitty takes a little meat and some wine in her bedroom and lets us wash her face and hands and change her gown.

  ‘You’re doing very well,’ I whisper to her, plaiting her hair and putting on her hood.

  A sudden chill clutches me when I meet her gaze in her looking-glass and see the despair in her eyes. They really are going to kill this child if they continue hounding her. I warned them not to distress her, and I spoke more truly than I knew. She is too young and too fearful of the infinite power of the king to be able to bear this interrogation from his archbishop. She feels that she is under the eye of God and Man. She is not on a rack, but they are pulling her apart all the same.

  Cranmer returns with a fresh ream of papers in his arms and a pot of ink and a sharpened quill and sealing wax and a candle. Surely, he cannot hope that she can speak coherently enough for a statement of innocence? And then I think: of course he does not! He will have it already composed in his own mind. This is him, wrapping it up neatly: a confession of small sins in girlhood and a general plea for mercy. I am so happy that I help him with the ink and the candle, and settle the two of them at the table in the privy chamber and order the ladies to bed, except for Isabel and I, who wait in the presence chamber.

  It goes very quiet behind the great doors to the privy chamber, and I know, as surely as if I were a spy at the keyhole, that he is writing down an account, a completely fictional version of Kitty’s petty misdeeds at Norfolk House, Lambeth, forgivingly transcribed.

  At midnight, the archbishop comes out with a sheaf of papers, heavy with seals.

  ‘Watch her,’ he says to me, as if it was not him who drove her to hysterical crying. ‘She is much distressed; but she will feel better for her confession.’

  I dare not say: she has confessed to nothing but what you have named to her – this is a quaesita – an inquiry by torture. My spymaster Thomas Cromwell would have had every scrap of evidence from everyone else before he even spoke to her; and then he would only have allowed her to confirm what the king wanted to know. Thomas Cromwell knew every word of evidence that he wanted before he looked for it. But you – prurient as any old midwife – will have been raking through her linen and asking her about privy marks and hot breaths and dirty sheets, and now she is crying for shame at your disrespect in naming such things to her. You are a fool as my spymaster was not: you don’t know what you want to know, and you don’t know what to do with what you’ve found.

  THE NEXT MORNING, the archbishop comes to our rooms and says that although she may not meet with the king today, she may write him a letter. She is to explain all that she has done and explain everything that has been said against her. This will serve as confession, vindication, and plea for pardon, and her husband the king will read it and forgive her.

  Of course, she should have a clerk or secretary to write for her, and she ought to have a lawyer to warn her what not to say. But I remember Sir Thomas More warning Bishop Fisher to write nothing, to say nothing, and then Sir Thomas More was executed for saying nothing and the bishop was executed, too. So it makes little difference what she writes, as the archbishop has already heard the confession, set a penance, and is about to deliver the king’s pardon. I carry sharpened quills and pots of ink behind the two of them, and I lay them on the table before her, as tidily as I used to prepare the writing table in my father’s library.

  I rest a hand on her trembling shoulder, and I say to Archbishop Cranmer: ‘Would you like me to write for the queen, as her secretary, Your Grace?’

  And the old fraud says: ‘No, no, she shall write it herself.’

  I think of her misspelled love letter to Culpeper and how she told him that she had taken such pains to write in her own hand. She is incapable of assembling her distress into coherent sentences; she cannot even form legible letters. If a fluent statement of confession comes out of this morning’s work, we will all know that the author is the Cambridge University educated archbishop and not the girl who was taught nothing more than flirtation and dancing at Norfolk House.

  It takes him the full day, but in the dusk of the early evening, the father of the church comes out smiling, with three pages of beautifully written narrative, and says to me: ‘She will be easier in her mind now that she has made a full confession and asked the king for pardon.’

  One glance at her anguished exhaustion tells me that she is not easier in her mind, and I am very sure she has not made a full confession; but I curtsey very low, bowing my head, and he gives me his signet ring to kiss.

  ‘God’s will be done,’ I whisper, knowing that it is the king’s will that is done and that Kitty’s confession is whatever Cranmer thinks that the king wants to hear. He has the pages in his hand; I can see the writing as I curtsey. It is a work of art in the cursive antiquior – court hand – of official documents, elaborate and complicated.

  I glimpse a sentence: My sorrow I can by no writing express. Nevertheless, I trust your most benign nature will have some respect unto my youth …

  I could almost laugh. Kitty Howard never used a word like ‘benign’ in her life and would have no idea of how to spell it; she would make many attempts and certainly never imagine a ‘g’. But the main thing – really the only thing – is that the Archbishop of Canterbury has turned this farrago of tears and confessions and downright lies into a plea of pardon to an old husband quite besotted with his younger wife. She can say that she is a sinner; she can say that she was misled and misguided; she can say that she was ignorant of the glorious destiny before her. She can even admit to a pretend betrothal, while he was marrying his third wife before this very archbishop; she can humble herself and say she is worthy of the most extreme punishment – and he will forgive her.

  Francis Dereham has done the only good act in all his worthless life: diverted everyone from Culpeper. Since everyone has been looking at the windy braggart Dereham, with his loud assertions of intimacy with the queen when she was a girl, nobody has noticed the infinitely more desirable Thomas Culpeper who is her lover now she is a wife and a queen. The girl will not be blamed for being coerced by a rogue whose greatest ambition was to be a pirate. She will be accused of childhood folly, and they will completely miss the great love of her life.

  I put her to bed with a bowl of soup and a glass of wine, and I tell her that it is all over. Tomorrow, she will be restored, and everything will be well. I speak to her gently, reassuring her as if she were a little girl frightened by a nightmare. In truth, we are all frightened by a nightmare, and none of us have the courage to name the monster that comes after us in our dreams. But tonight, I tell her that we are through the worst of it and that we will survive and be happy. I am certain that if we can only get through the next six months, it will be May Day and the king – the monster in the maze – will be long dead and gone.

  She is paler than her fine linen sheets, the shadows under her eyes as dark as if they were bruises from a husband’s fists. ‘It’s over?’ she whispers.

  ‘I think so. Two signed confessions – and best of all: no mention of Lincoln or Pontefract or York.’

  She reaches up and puts her cold little hands over my mouth. ‘We never speak of it.’

  ‘Never,’ I assure her.