The ghosts that have haunted me since that day in May will take me for their own now. I am where they walked, I feel the chill of the same walls, I know the same terror, I am living their deaths.

Dear God, it must have been like this for him, for George, my beloved George. He must have heard that gate bang, he must have seen the stone bulk of the Tower block out the sky, he must have known that his friends and his enemies were somewhere inside these walls, lying their heads off to save themselves and to condemn him. And now I am here walking where he walked, and now I know what he felt, and now I know fear, as he knew it.

If Cranmer and his inquisitors look no further than Katherine’s life when she was a girl, before she came to court, they have enough to destroy her; and what more do they need than that? If they rest on her affairs with Manox and Dereham, then they need nothing from me. I did not even know her then. It is nothing to do with me. So I should have nothing to fear. But if that is the case, then why am I here?

The room is cramped, with stone-paved floors and damp stone walls. The walls are pocked with the carved initials of people who have been held here before me. I will not look for GB, ‘George Boleyn’; I think I should go mad if I saw his name. I will sit quietly by the window, and look out to the courtyard below. I will not go over the walls for his name, fingering the cold stone looking for ‘Boleyn’, and touch where he carved. I will sit quietly here and look out of the window.

No, this is no good. The window looks out on to Tower Green, my prison chamber looks down on the very spot where Anne was beheaded on my evidence. I cannot look at that place, I cannot look at the bright greenness of the grass—surely it is more verdant than any autumn grass should be?—if I look at the green I will surely lose my mind. It must have been like this for her when she was waiting, and she would have known that I knew enough to have her beheaded. And she must have known that I would choose to have her beheaded. She knew that she had tormented me and teased me and laughed at me until I was beside myself with jealousy, she must have wondered how far I would follow my evil rage, even to seek her death? Then she knew. She knew I gave witness against the two of them, that I spoke out in a clear voice and condemned them without remorse. Well, I feel remorse now; God knows that I do.

I feel as if I have been hiding myself from the truth for all these years, but it took that hard man the Duke of Norfolk to spell it out to me, and it took these cold walls to make it real for me. I was jealous of Anne and her love for George and his devotion to her, and I bore witness not from what I knew to be a fact, but from what would harm them the most. God forgive me. I took his tenderness and his care and his kindness for his sister and I made it into something dirty and dark and bad because I could not bear that he was not tender nor careful nor kind to me. I brought him to his death to punish him for neglecting me. And now, like some old play in which the gods are furious, I am still neglected. I have never been more alone. I have committed the greatest sin a wife could do, and still I have no satisfaction.