‘Because you asked me to help you,’ I say. ‘I am your friend.’

‘Did you help Anne Boleyn?’

‘No!’ I exclaim. ‘She would have no help of mine!’

‘You were not her friend?’

‘I was her sister-in-law.’

‘Did she not like you?’

‘I doubt she ever saw me from start to finish. She had no eyes for me.’

This does not halt her speculation, as I intended, but feeds it. I can almost hear the slow revolving of her thoughts.

‘She didn’t like you?’ Katherine asks. ‘She and her husband and her sister, they were always together. But they left you out.’

I laugh but it doesn’t come out well. ‘You make it sound like children in the schoolyard.’

She nods. ‘That is just how it is in a royal court. And did you hate them for not letting you join them?’

‘I was a Boleyn,’ I say. ‘I was a Boleyn as much as they. I was a Boleyn by marriage, their uncle the duke is my uncle. My interests are in the family as theirs were.’

‘So why did you give evidence against them?’ she asks.

I am so shocked at her directly accusing me, I can hardly speak. I look at her. ‘Where did you hear of this? Why would you speak of this?’

‘Catherine Carey told me,’ she says, as if it is unremarkable that the two girls, all but children, should share confidences about treason and incest and death. ‘She said that you bore witness against your husband and his sister. You gave evidence to show that they were lovers and traitors.’

‘I did not,’ I whisper. ‘I did not.’ I cannot bear her naming this, I never think of it. I will not think of it today. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I say. ‘You don’t understand because you are only a girl. You were a child when all this happened. I tried to save him, I tried to save her. It was a great plan of your uncle’s devising. It failed, but it should have succeeded. I thought that I would save him if I gave evidence, but it all went wrong.’

‘Is that how it was?’

‘It was heartbreaking!’ I cry out in my pain. ‘I tried to save him, I loved him, I would have done anything for him.’

Her pretty young face is filled with sympathy. ‘You meant to save him?’

I dash the tears from my eyes with the back of my glove. ‘I would have died for him,’ I say. ‘I thought I would save him. I was going to save him. I would have done anything to save him.’

‘Why did it go wrong?’ she whispers.

‘Your uncle and I thought that if they pleaded guilty that she would be divorced and would be sent away, to a convent. We thought that he would be stripped of his title and his honours and banished. The men who were named with her were never guilty, everyone knew that. They were George’s friends and her courtiers, not lovers. We thought they would all be forgiven, as Thomas Wyatt was forgiven.’