Listen! Listen! I hear it! The noise of saws and hammers. I peep out of the window and I clap my hands as if delighted to see the workmen building the scaffold: Katherine’s scaffold. They will behead her under my window. If I dare, I can watch it all happen. I shall have the best view of everyone. When she is dead they will send me away, probably to my family at Blickling, and then I can quietly and secretly grow sane again. I shall take my time, I want no-one inquiring after me. I shall dance about for a year or two, singing songs and talking to clouds, and at the end of it, when the new king, King Edward, is on the throne and the old scores forgotten I shall return to court and serve the new queen as well as I can.

Oh! There’s a plank gone down with a clatter and a young man cuffed for carelessness. I shall set up a cushion on the window-ledge and watch them all day, it is as good as a masque at court to see them measuring and sawing and building. What a fuss to make about building such a stage when the show will last for only a few minutes! When they bring me my dinner I clap my hands and point and the warders shake their heads and put down the dishes and go quietly away.

KATHERINE, SYON ABBEY,

FEBRUARY 1542

It is a morning like every other morning, quiet, nothing to do, no entertainment, no amusement, no company. I am so bored with everything and with myself that when I hear the tramp of feet on the path outside my window, I am absolutely delighted at the thought of something happening—I am beyond caring what. I run like a child to the tall window and I look out, and there is a royal escort marching up the path through the garden from the river. They have come by barge, and there is my uncle the duke’s standard, and there are the men in his livery, and there he is himself, looking powerful and bad tempered as always, at the head of them, and half a dozen Privy Councillors with him.

At last! At last! I am so relieved that I could weep to see them. It is my uncle returned to me! My uncle come back to tell me what to do. At last I am to be freed. At last he has come for me and I am to be released. I should think I shall be taken by my uncle to one of his houses in the country, which will not be very amusing, but better than here. Or perhaps I shall have to go far away, perhaps France. France would be wonderful, except I cannot speak French or at any rate only ‘voilà!’ but surely they must mostly all speak English? And if not, then they can learn?

The door opens and the warden of my household comes in. His eyes are filled with tears. ‘Madam,’ he says. ‘They have come for you.’