I give a little gasp. Syon House is where Katherine Howard was held before she was taken to the Tower and beheaded.

“It’s my father’s house now,” Mary says impatiently, as if she guesses that I am afraid. “He just wants to meet us there.”

“What for?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.” She settles back, folds her hands inside her cape and stares over the heads of the laboring rowers, over the darkening river as the wooded banks and fields slide by. We pass water meads where heron flap slowly up out of the flooded fields and fold themselves into high trees; we pass wet pasture where the cattle squelching in the mud look at us reproachfully as if we are to blame for spoiling their cloudy drinking water and not their own heavy hooves. We pass thick woodland where the trees bend down to their own reflections and all I can see is branch meeting reflected branch, and green leaves to greener weed. The last glow of the sun turns gray, Mary straightens the fur around my shoulders and a thin waning moon rises behind us, throwing a pale yellowish light on the glassy waters like a will-o’-the-wisp urging us onward to our destruction.

“Do you really not know why they have sent for me?” I ask Mary, very quietly, as if the darkening sky must not hear.

She shakes her head as if she too does not dare to break the silence, and an owl hoots and then I see it, white as a ghost, thick wings spread, as it weaves from one tree to another, and then we hear again that mournful call.

It is hours before she says: “There!” and I can see the lights. It is Syon House.

SYON HOUSE, ISLEWORTH,

JULY 1553

They berth the barge precisely at the pier, make it fast, run out the gangplank, and bow to us as we disembark. There are servants with torches, and they light the long allée up to the great house. My lord father-in-law has rebuilt the old abbey into a private house, but he has left whole walls and the stone tracery of beautiful windows standing bleak and pale in the moonlight, so I can almost hear the whisper of plainsong and the chant of the nuns weaving around the skeleton of their home.