“You know he would,” he interrupts me. “You know that is why the queen has chosen him. Hastings is the Protestant heir. He will put her in the Tower, or in his own house, and she will never come out. They will announce that she is in frail health, and then that she is worse, and then that she is dead.”

The bleakness in his voice is terrible to me.

“Or they will kill her on the journey and say she fell from her horse,” he predicts. His face is wet with sweat, his mouth twisted with pain.

“But if the queen commands it?”

“I cannot let her go out to her death.”

“If it is the queen’s order—”

“I cannot let her go.”

I take a breath. “Why not?” I ask. I dare him to tell me. “Why can you not let her go?”

He turns away from me. “She is my guest,” he mutters. “A matter of honor...”

I turn a hard face to him. “You learn to let her go,” I say harshly. “Honor has nothing to do with it. You command yourself to let her go, even to her death. Bring yourself to it. We cannot stop their taking her, and if we protest we only look worse. They think you are disloyal already; if you try to save her from Hastings, they will be certain that she has turned you to her side. They will know you for a traitor.”

“This is to send her to her death!” he repeats, his voice breaking. “Bess! You have been her friend, you have spent day after day with her. You cannot be so heartless as to hand her over to her murderer!”

I glance back to my desk, to the figures in my book. I know to a penny what she has cost us so far. If we defend her against the queen we will lose everything. If the queen thinks we are overly fond of this other queen she will destroy us. If she charges us with treason we will lose our lands and every single thing we own. If we are found guilty of treason it is a hanging offense; we will both die for my husband’s tender heart. I cannot risk it. “Who cares?”

“What?”

“I said, Who cares? Who cares if they take her and behead her in a field and leave her body in a ditch? Who cares about her?”

There is a terrible silence in the room. My husband looks at me as if I am a monster. The Fool and the Monster face each other and I wonder at what we have become. Twenty-one months ago we were a newly married man and wife, well pleased with the contract we had made, enjoying each other, the joint heads of one of the greatest families in the kingdom. Now we are ruined in our hearts and our fortunes. We have ruined ourselves.