‘Please,’ I whisper. I don’t even know what I am begging for now. I just hope that this will stop. I just want it not to be happening. ‘Please, good sirs . . . please.’

We go in by the watergate, it rolls up silently as soon as the guards see us coming, and the oarsmen ship their oars and our boat glides into the dock inside the dark shadow of the wall. The Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edmund Walsingham, is standing at the steps, waiting to greet me as if I were arriving to stay in the royal apartments, as if I were still queen and a pretty new queen at that. The portcullis splashes down behind us as the chains roll it down, and they lift me out of the barge and take both my arms and heave me up the steps, my feet stumbling.

‘Good day, Lady Katherine,’ he says, as polite as ever. But I say nothing because I cannot stop sobbing, little gasping sobs that come and go with every breath. I look back and my uncle is standing on the barge, waiting to see me go. He will be out of the watergate like a wherry shooting the rapids the moment his duty is done. He will be desperate that the shadow of the Tower does not fall on him. He will be rushing back to the king to assure him that the Howard family has given up their bad girl. It is me who is going to pay the price for the Howard ambition; not him.

I scream, ‘Uncle!’ but he just gives a gesture of his hand as if to say, ‘take her away’, and they do. They lead me up the stairs, past the White Tower, and across the green. The workmen are building a platform on the lawn, a little wooden stage standing about three foot high, with broad steps going up to it. Others are fencing off the paths. The men on either side of me walk a little faster and look away, and this makes me absolutely certain that this is my scaffold, and the fence is to hold back the crowd who will come to see me die.

‘How many people will come?’ I ask, the little coughing sobs make it hard for me to breathe.

‘A couple of hundred,’ the warden says uncomfortably. ‘It is not open to the public. Just to the court. As a favour to you. The king’s own orders.’

I nod, it is not much of a favour, I think. Ahead the door of the tower opens before us and I go up the narrow stone stairs with one man slightly ahead of me hauling me up and the other pushing from behind. ‘I can walk,’ I say and they let go of my arms but stay close beside me. My room is on the first floor, the large glazed window overlooks the green. There is a fire in the grate, there is a stool by the fire and a table with a Bible, and beyond that there is a bed.