Monmouth says, ‘You have not forgot our brothers whom Thomas More burned? And those he hounded to death? Those broken by months in prison?’

‘He didn’t break you. You lived to see More come down.’

‘But his arm reached out of his grave,’ Packington says. ‘More had men everywhere, all about Tyndale. It was More’s agents who betrayed him. If you cannot move the king, perhaps the queen can?’

‘The queen needs help herself. And if you want to help her, tell your wives to curb their poisoned tongues.’

He moves away. Rafe’s children – his stepchildren rather – are crying out to him to come and see their disguises. But the conversation, broken off, leaves a sour taste in his mouth that persists throughout the festival. Anthony pursues him with jokes, but he turns his eyes to the child dressed as an angel: it is Rafe’s step-daughter, the elder child of his wife Helen. She is wearing the peacock wings he made long ago for Grace.

Long ago? It is not ten years, not nearly ten. The feathers’ eyes gleam; the day is dark, but banks of candles pick out threads of gold, the scarlet splash of holly berries bound on the wall, the points of the silver star. That night, as snowflakes float to earth, Gregory asks him, ‘Where do the dead live now? Do we have Purgatory or not? They say it still exists, but no one knows where. They say we do no good by praying for the suffering souls. We cannot pray them out, as once we could.’

When his family died, he had done everything as was the custom in those days: offerings, masses. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘The king will not allow preaching on Purgatory, it is so contentious. You can talk to Archbishop Cranmer.’ A twist of his mouth. ‘He’ll tell you the latest thinking.’

‘I take it very hard if I cannot pray for my mother. Or if they let me pray but say I am wasting my breath because nobody hears me.’

Imagine the silence now, in that place which is no-place, that anteroom to God where each hour is ten thousand years long. Once you imagined the souls held in a great net, a web spun by God, held safe till their release into his radiance. But if the net is cut and the web broken, do they spill into freezing space, each year falling further into silence, until there is no trace of them at all?

He takes the child to a looking glass so she can see her wings. Her steps are tentative, she is in awe at herself. Mirrored, the peacock eyes speak to him. Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here: a whisper, a touch, a feather’s breath from you.

Four days later, Eustache Chapuys, the ambassador of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, arrives in Stepney. He comes in to a warm welcome from the household, who approach him and wish him well in Latin and French. Chapuys is a Savoyard, speaks some Spanish but English hardly at all, though he is beginning to understand more than he speaks.