JANE BOLEYN, HAMPTON COURT,

NOVEMBER 1541

That devil the archbishop has terrified the girl half out of her wits and now she does not know whether to lie or confess. My lord the duke has come with him for another visit and while they try to pull the sobbing queen from her bed he pauses beside me. ‘Will she confess to Culpepper?’ he whispers, so low that I have to lean against him to hear it.

‘If you let the archbishop work on her she will confess to anything,’ I warn him in a hurried whisper. ‘I cannot keep her quiet. He torments her with hope and then he threatens her with damnation. She is only a silly girl, and he seems determined to break her. He will drive her mad if he keeps threatening her.’

He gives a short laugh, almost like a groan. ‘She had better pray for madness, it could be the only thing that saves her,’ he says. ‘Good God. Two nieces as Queens of England and both of them end on the scaffold!’

‘What could save her?’

‘They can’t execute her if she is mad,’ he says absently. ‘You can’t stand trial for treason if you are mad. They would have to send her away to a convent. Good God, is that her screaming now?’

The eerie cries of Kitty Howard begging to be spared are echoing through her rooms as the women try to pull her in to face the archbishop.

‘What will you do?’ I demand. ‘This can’t go on.’

‘I’ll try to keep clear of this,’ he says bleakly. ‘I hoped to see her with her wits about her today. I was going to advise her to plead guilty to Dereham and deny Culpepper, then she has done nothing worse than marry with a pre-contract in place, as Anne of Cleves. She might have got away with that. He might even have taken her back. But at this rate she will kill herself before the axeman gets her.’

‘Keep clear?’ I demand. ‘And what about me?’

His face is like a flint. ‘What about you?’

‘I’ll take the French count,’ I say to him rapidly. ‘Whatever the contract is, I’ll take him. I’ll live with him in France for a few years, wherever he likes. I’ll lie low until the king has recovered from this, I can’t go back into exile, I can’t go back to Blickling. I can’t stand it. I can’t go through it all again. I really can’t. I’ll take the French count even without a good settlement. Even if he is old and ugly, even if he’s deformed. I’ll take the French count.’

The duke shouts with sudden laughter like a baited bear, bellowing in my face. I recoil; but his amusement is horribly sincere. In these terrible rooms filled with women crying to Katherine to compose herself and her awful, high-pitched wailing, and the archbishop praying loudly over the noise, the duke roars out his merriment. ‘A French count!’ he bellows. ‘A French count! Are you mad? Are you run as mad as my niece?’