But this is her cousin that she has loved from childhood. We all know and love him. We all have a story about his temper or his wit, about his absurd pride and his wonderful taste. We have all relished his lavish hospitality; we have all admired his great lands, the fidelity of his servants, the devotion that he showed to his wives; this is a man I have been proud to call my friend. We all care for his children, who will be orphans tomorrow, another generation of heartbroken Howards. We all want this man to live. Yet tomorrow I will stand before his scaffold and witness his execution and then go down the river and tell his cousin the queen that he is dead.

I am thinking of all this as I walk along the cold lane around the White Tower, and then I check as two women are coming the other way. In the flicker of the torchlight I see the queen, walking with a lady-in-waiting behind her, a yeoman of the guard behind the two of them, his torch smoking in the cold air from the river.

“You here too?” she says quietly to me.

I take my hat from my head and I kneel on the wet cobbles.

“Sleepless too, old man?” she says with a ghost of a smile.

“Sleepless and sad,” I say.

“I too,” she says with a sigh. “But if I forgive him, I sign my own death warrant.”

I stand up. “Walk with me,” she says and puts her hand in my arm. We go together, slowly, the white stonework of the Tower beside us gleaming in the moonlight. Together we walk up the steps to the open grass of Tower Green, where the scaffold is new-built and smelling of fresh wood, like a stage waiting for players, expectant.

“Pray God it stops here,” she says, looking at the scaffold where her own mother put down her head. “If you can stop her plotting, Shrewsbury, this can be the last man who dies for her.”

I cannot promise. The other queen will go to her grave demanding her freedom, asserting the sanctity of her person. I know this now, as I know her: she is a woman I have loved and studied for years.

“You would never execute her?” I say, very low.

The white face Elizabeth turns to me is that of a gorgon in her cold forbidding beauty, a dangerous angel. The torch behind her gives her a halo of gold like a saint, but the flicker of smoke smells of sulfur. The sight of her, a queen triumphant, ringed with fire, strange and silent, fills me with wordless terror as if she were some kind of portent, a blazing comet, foretelling death.