“Please tell me,” I say. I can feel a pain extending from my belly to the back of my throat and I realize this is grief and longing. I love Thomas and I have been his undoing. I never thought that I would wish that we had not married, but I will learn to wish it, if he is suffering for my sake.

“Please tell me everything you know, Sir William.”

“They have put him in the Fleet Prison,” he says. “But at least winter is coming and the plague season is past us.”

So the letter is true, as I knew it was. Thomas’s prison is on the River Fleet, the dirtiest river in London. It will be damp and bitterly cold in winter. Prisoners have to pay for their own firewood, for blankets for their bed. If Thomas’s family do not send him money and food, he will starve. He’s not a young man; he will get sick, held in close confinement there.

“They have given him a very small cell,” Sir William says very quietly. He glances around my little room, the small space either side of the bed, the table and chair tucked into the corner, the small high window and the cramped interior. “Of course, he is a very big man.”

I think of Thomas as I first saw him, standing tall before the great gate of Whitehall Palace, his thumbs tucked in his shining leather belt, his broad shoulders set square, his towering presence, his grace. For a big man he is light on his feet, a quick thinker. I remember how he smiles when he sees me, how he drops to one knee to talk to me.

“How small is his room?” I can’t imagine what Sir William is telling me. “How small exactly?”

He clears his throat. “He can’t stand up in it,” he says reluctantly. “He has to bow over. And he is too long for it as well. He can’t lie in his bed stretched out. He has to fold up.”

I remember Thomas, his feet sticking out of the foot of his bed. He is nearly seven feet tall. They have not imprisoned him; they are crushing him.

“He will be in pain,” I say flatly.

“And they don’t feed him,” he says, shamefaced. “He is hunting game and little birds with a slingshot from his cell window so that he has meat to eat.”

I put my hand to my mouth to hold back a retch. “It is a death sentence,” I say quietly.

Sir William nods. “I am so sorry, my lady.”

* * *