‘I don’t know,’ she says. She looks like a frightened child. ‘I can’t tell. Nobody tells me anything except that I have to please him. And I have to do that.’

JANE BOLEYN, WESTMINSTER PALACE,

MAY 1540

The queen is in the royal box high above the jousting lists and though she is pale with anxiety she carries herself like a queen indeed. She has a smile for the hundreds of Londoners who have flocked to the palace to see the royal family and the nobles, the mock battles, the pageants, and the jousts. There are to be six challengers and six defenders and they circle the arena with their entourage and their shields and their banners and the trumpets scream out the fanfare and the crowd shouts their bets and it is like a dream with the noise and the heat and the glare of the sun beating off the golden sand in the arena.

If I stand at the rear of the royal box and half-close my eyes I can see ghosts today. I can see Queen Katherine leaning forwards and waving her hand to her young husband, I can even see his shield with this motto: Sir Loyal Heart.

Sir Loyal Heart! I would laugh if the king’s changeable heart had not been the death of so many. Loyal only to its own desires is the king’s heart, and this day, this May Day, it has changed again, like the spring wind, and is blowing another way.

I step to one side and a ray of sunshine peeping through a gap in the awning dazzles me and for a moment I see Anne at the front of the box, my Anne, Anne Boleyn with her head flung back in laughter and the white line of her throat exposed. It was a hot May Day that year, Anne’s last year, and she blamed the sun when she was sweating with fear. She knew that she was in trouble but she had no idea of her danger. How should she have known? We none of us knew. We none of us dreamed that he would put that long, lovely neck down on a block of wood and hire a French swordsman to hack it off. How should anyone dream that a man would do that to the wife he had adored? He broke the faith of his kingdom to have her. Why would he then break her?

If we had known . . . but it is pointless to say: if we had known.

Perhaps we would have run away. Me, and George my husband, and Anne his sister, and Elizabeth her daughter. Perhaps we might have run away and been free of this terror and this ambition and this lust for this life that is the English court. But we did not run. We sat like hares, cowering in the long grass at the sound of the hounds, hoping that the hunt would pass by; but that very day the soldiers came for my husband and for my beloved sister-in-law Anne. And I? I sat mum, and let them go, and never said one word to save them.