JANE BOLEYN, GREENWICH PALACE,

DECEMBER 1539

Thank God I am here in Greenwich, the most beautiful of the king’s palaces, back where I belong in the queen’s rooms. Last time I was here I was nursing Jane Seymour as she burned up with fever, asking for Henry, who never came; but now the rooms have been repainted, and I have been restored and she has been forgotten. I alone have survived. I have survived the fall of Queen Katherine, the disgrace of Queen Anne and the death of Queen Jane. It is a miracle to me that I have survived but here I am, back at court, one of the favoured few, the very favoured few. I shall serve the new queen as I have served her predecessors, with love and loyalty and an eye to my own opportunities. I shall once again walk in and out of the best chambers of the best palaces of the land as my home. I am once again where I was born and bred to be.

Sometimes I can even forget everything that has happened. Sometimes, I forget I am a widow of thirty, with a son far away from me. I think I am a young woman again with a husband I worship, and everything to hope for. I am returned to the very centre of my world. Almost I could say: I am reborn.

The king has planned a Christmas wedding and the queen’s ladies are being assembled for the festivities. Thanks to my lord duke, I am one of them, restored to the friends and rivals I have known since my childhood. Some of them welcome me back with a wry smile and a backhand compliment, some of them look askance at me. Not that they loved Anne so much—not they—but they were frightened by her fall and they remember that I alone escaped, it is like magic that I escaped, it makes them cross themselves and whisper old rumours against me.

Bessie Blount, the king’s old mistress, now married far above her station to Lord Clinton, greets me kindly enough. I have not seen her since the death of her son Henry Fitzroy, who the king made a duke, Duke of Richmond, for nothing more than being a royal bastard, and when I say how sorry I am for her loss, shallow words of politeness, she suddenly grips my hand and looks at me, her face pale and demanding, as if to ask me wordlessly if I know how it was that he died? Will I tell her how he died?

I smile coolly and unwrap her fingers from my wrist. I cannot tell her because truly I don’t know, and if I did know I would not tell her. ‘I am very sorry for the loss of your son,’ I say again.

She will probably never know why he died nor how. But neither will thousands. Thousands of mothers saw their sons march out to protect the shrines, the holy places, the roadside statues, the monasteries and the churches, and thousands of sons never came home again. The king will decide what is faith and what is heresy, it is not for the people to say. In this new and dangerous world it is not even for the church to say. The king will decide who will live and who will die, he has the power of God now. If Bessie really wants to know who killed her son she had better ask the king his father; but she knows Henry too well to do that.