‘When the queen asked you to fetch Thomas Culpepper to her room, did you know what were her intentions?’

I am stunned. How do we go from Francis Dereham to Thomas Culpepper in one leap? How do they know of Thomas Culpepper? What do they know of Thomas Culpepper? What has he told them? Is he on the rack vomiting in pain and sicking up the truth?

‘She never asked me,’ I say.

The clerk puts down a dash.

‘We know that she asked you to fetch him, and we know that he came. Now, to save your life, will you tell us what took place between Thomas Culpepper and Katherine Howard?’

The clerk’s pen is poised, I can feel the words in my dry mouth. It is over. She is ruined, he is a dead man, I am on the brink of betrayal: again.

ANNE, RICHMOND PALACE,

DECEMBER 1541

The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk has been questioned on her sickbed as to the behaviour of her granddaughter. She will be tried for letting the girl go to the king without warning him that she was no virgin. This is now called treason. She will be accused of treason because her granddaughter took a lover. If she is found guilty that will be another old lady’s head on Henry’s block.

Dereham is accused with Culpepper of presumptive treason. The cause is that they both had intercourse with the queen. Dereham is accused even though there is no evidence against him and most believe that he laid with her long before she was queen, before even I was queen. Nonetheless this is to be called treason. The king has named Katherine Howard as a ‘common harlot’—oh, Kitty, that anyone should speak like that of you! Both young men plead guilty to presumptive treason in the hopes of forgiveness. Both deny having lain with the queen. Their judge—unbelievable though it is to anyone but a subject of King Henry’s—is the Duke of Norfolk, who knows more of this than any man can say. His Grace the duke has returned from the country to hear the evidence of his niece Katherine promising to marry Dereham, admitting him to her bedroom and to her bed. He has heard the evidence of Dereham coming into her household when she was queen and that is apparently enough to prove the young couple guilty. For why, the inquisitors indignantly demand, would Dereham come to work for the queen if not to seduce her? The idea that he would hope to profit from her success as all the rest of them have done, her uncle among them, is not mentioned.

Culpepper started by denying everything, but once the queen’s ladies had given their statements, Lady Rochford among them, he could see that he was finished and he is now pleading guilty. Both young men are to be half-hanged and then their bellies slit open, their guts pulled out, and then butchered as they bleed to death, for the crime of loving the pretty girl who married the king.