There is a stir in the crowd, and everyone is craning to look at the door at the foot of the tower. I stand up on my toes and push my face against the cold glass so that I can see what they are all looking at. It is her: little Kitty Howard, staggering to the scaffold. Her legs seem to have given way, she is being carried between a guard and a woman in waiting, and they half drag her to the steps and then her little wavering feet wander about and they have to bodily lift her and push her up to the stage. I laugh at the incongruity of this, then I catch myself at the horror of laughing at a girl, almost a child, on the way to her death. Then I realise it sounds as if I am mad, and I laugh again for the benefit of the priest, praying for my soul in the room behind me.

She looks as if she has fainted, they are slapping her face and pinching her cheeks, poor little mite. She stumbles to the front of the stage and clutches the rail and tries to speak. I can’t hear what she says, I doubt anybody can hear much. I can see her lips, it looks as if she is saying: ‘Please’.

She falls back and they catch her and push her into kneeling before the block, she clings to it, as if it might save her. Even from here I can see she is weeping. Then gently, just as she does at bedtime, as if she were a little girl settling down to sleep, she strokes a lock of her hair away from her face with her hand, and puts her head down on the smooth wood. She turns her little head and lays her cheek on the wood. Tentatively—as if she wishes she didn’t have to do it—she stretches out her trembling hands and the headsman is in a hurry and his axe flashes down like a bolt of lightning.

I scream at the great gout of blood and the way her head bounces on the platform. The priest behind me falls silent, and I remember that I must not forget my part, not for a moment, and so I call out: ‘Kitty, is that you? Is that you, Kitty? Is it a game?’

‘Poor woman,’ the priest says, and gets to his feet. ‘Give me a sign that you have confessed your sins and die in faith, poor witless thing.’

I jump down from the windowsill for I hear the grate of the key in the lock and now they will come to take me home. They will take me out of the back door and hurry me to the watergate and then, I guess, by unmarked barge, probably to Greenwich and then perhaps by boat to Norwich. ‘Time to go,’ I say merrily.

‘God bless her and forgive her,’ the priest says. He holds out his Bible for me to kiss.