The room was in deep shade, still shuttered for confinement. I looked around. The queen was not seated on any of the looming chairs nor crumpled in the great bed. She was not on her knees before her prie-dieu. I could not see her anywhere.

Then I heard a little noise, a tiny sound, like a child catching her breath after a bout of sobbing. A sound so small and so thin and so poignant that it was like a child who has cried for so long that she has forgotten to cry, and despaired of the grief ever going away.

‘Mary,’ I whispered. ‘Where are you?’

As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I finally made her out. She was lying on the floor amid the rushes, face turned towards the skirting board, hunched like a starving woman will hunch over her empty belly. I crawled on my hands and knees across the floor towards her, sweeping aside the strewing herbs as I went, their scent billowing around me as I approached her and gently touched her shoulders.

She did not respond. I don’t think she even knew I was there. She was locked in a grief so deep and so impenetrable that I thought she would be trapped in that inner darkness for the rest of her life.

I stroked her shoulder as one might stroke a dying animal. Since words could do nothing, a gentle touch might help; but I did not know if she could even feel that. Then, I lifted her shoulders gently from the floor, put her head in my lap and took her hood from her poor weary head and wiped the tears as they poured from her closed eyelids down her tired lined face. I sat with her in silence until her deeper breathing told me that she had fallen asleep. Even in her sleep the tears still welled up from her closed eyelids and ran down her wet cheeks.

* * *

When I came out of the queen’s rooms, Lord Robert was there.

‘You,’ I said, without much pleasure.

‘Aye, me,’ he said. ‘And no need to look so sour. I am not to blame.’

‘You’re a man,’ I observed. ‘And men are mostly to blame for the sorrow that women suffer.’

He gave a short laugh. ‘I am guilty of being a man, I admit it. You can come and dine in my rooms. I had them make you some broth and some bread and some fruit. Your boy is there too. Will has him.’

I went with him, his arm around my waist.

‘Is she ill?’ he asked, his mouth to my ear.

‘I have never seen anyone in a worse state,’ I said.

‘Bleeding? Sick?’

‘Broken-hearted,’ I said shortly.

He nodded at that and swept me into his rooms. They were not the grand Dudley rooms that he used to command at court. They were a modest set of three rooms but he had them arranged very neat with a couple of beds for his servants, and a privy chamber for himself and a fire with a pot of broth sitting beside it, and a table laid for the three of us. As we went in Danny looked up from Will’s lap and made a little crow, the greatest noise he ever made, and stretched up for me. I took him in my arms.