‘What?’ I demand, quite baffled. ‘What are you laughing at? Hush, my lord. Hush. There’s nothing to laugh at.’

‘Nothing to laugh at?’ He cannot contain himself. ‘There never was a French count. There never could have been a French count. There never would be a French count or an English earl or an English baron. There would never be a Spanish don, or an Italian prince. No man in the world would ever have you. Are you such a fool that you don’t know that?’

‘But you said . . .’

‘I said anything to keep you at work for me, as you would say anything to suit your own cause. But I never thought you really believed me. Don’t you know what men think of you?’

I can feel my legs starting to tremble, it is like the time before, when I knew that I would have to betray them. When I knew that I would have to hide my falseness from my own face. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to know.’

His hard hands come down on my shoulders and he drags me to one of the queen’s expensive gilt-edged looking-glasses. In the soft silver reflection I see my own wide eyes looking back at me, and his face as hard as the face of Death himself. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘Look at yourself and know what you are: you liar, you false wife. There is not a man in the world who would marry you. You are known the length and breadth of Europe as the woman who sent her husband and her sister-in-law to the axeman. You are known in every court in Europe as a woman so vile that she sent her husband to be hanged . . .’ he gives me a shake ‘. . . to be cut down while still living, in his piss-wet breeches,’ he shakes me again, ‘to be slit from cock to throat, to see his belly and his liver and his lights pulled out and shown to him, to bleed to death while they burned his liver and his heart and his belly and his lungs before his face,’ he shakes me again, ‘and then finally to be sliced up like a beast on the butcher’s block, the head, the arms, the legs.’

‘They didn’t do that to him,’ I whisper, but my lips barely move in the reflection.

‘No thanks to you,’ he says. ‘That’s what people remember. The king, his worst enemy, spared him the torture that you had sent him to. The king let him be beheaded, but you sent him to be disembowelled. You, on the witness stand, swearing that he and Anne had been lovers, that he had mounted his own sister, that he was a sodomite, a bugger, with half the court, swearing that they had plotted the king’s death, swearing his life away, sending him to a death that you would not give to a dog.’

‘It was your plan.’ In the mirror my face is green with sickness at the truth being spoken out loud at last, my dark eyes bulging with horror. ‘It was your plan, not mine. I shall not be blamed for it. You said that we would save them. They would be pardoned if we gave evidence and they pleaded guilty.’