There is complete uproar. The rooms are stripped for a childbirth and the Tower guards go running around the city looking for a midwife who can come at once, and a wet nurse in milk. The Tower servants drag in a daybed to my bedroom and tie a rope to the posts of my bed for me to pull in my labor, while I stride up and down the rooms and clutch the back of a chair when my pains come. They are coming quickly now; I can hardly recover between them. The dogs are everywhere underfoot, and Mr. Nozzle sits on the top of the wooden shutter and watches me with concern in his twinkly brown eyes. I send a message to Ned, and when I glance out of my window as I walk back and forth, trying to ease the constant ache in my back, I see that his scarf has been replaced at his windowsill. He is flying the Seymour standard and I laugh aloud at his joy, and have to steady myself by bracing against the wall.

My lady-in-waiting, Mrs. Rother, comes in, white as her linen, and a fat red-faced woman follows her. “My lady,” Mrs. Rother says. “I had no idea! If you had told me, we could have prepared. This is the best midwife we could find in a hurry.”

“Don’t mind me!” the woman objects, speaking in the sharp accent of a Londoner born and bred.

“I don’t mind,” I assure her. “I hope you will care for me and my baby. This is my second birth.”

She holds my hands in her comforting meaty grip as the servants behind me make up the daybed with clean linen, and bring in jugs of hot water, clouts and sheets, and linen torn up into swaddling cloths.

Lucy holds Teddy on her hip. “Should I take him out?” she asks nervously. “And shouldn’t the dogs go out?”

I am suddenly overcome with tiredness. “Yes. Put everything to rights,” I say to Mrs. Rother and Lucy. “I want to lie down.”

They guide me to the daybed and let me rest between my pains. “Tell my lord that I am well,” I whisper to Lucy. “Tell him I am merry.”

* * *

The baby is born that evening, a beautiful boy, just as I prayed. They pack my bleeding parts with moss and tie my breasts up with linen and let me lie in the tattered big bed. They have found a wet nurse and she sits beside me and feeds him. We show him to Teddy, who points and says, “Hee!” as if to tell the baby to gee up. But Ned is not allowed to come to me.

The lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edward, whispers through the half-open door from the presence chamber, “I have sent your news to the court, Lady Hertford. I am afraid that they will be most surprised.”