They all crowd round me and I close my eyes to blot out the sight of the anxious avid faces. Then someone lifts me at my shoulders and two of them bear up my feet and I feel them put me onto my bed. Someone cuts my laces and loosens my stomacher so I can breathe more easily. Nan slips off my silk slippers and chafes my icy feet.

Someone holds a cup of warm ale to my lips and I sip, and then lean back on the pillows and open my eyes.

“You don’t feel hot,” one of the ladies volunteers nervously. They are all terrified of the Sweat. It can kill a man in four hours, and there is no easy way to tell if he will die. He complains of heat at dinner and he sweats to death by nightfall. It is a Tudor plague; it came in with this king’s father.

“I am sick in my belly,” I say. “Something I ate.”

Two of them exchange secret smiles. “Oh—do you feel sick in the mornings?” Anne Seymour says, suggestively, hopefully.

I shake my head. I don’t want this sort of rumor starting. Even now, as I am struggling with the news that Thomas is alive, I have to watch what I say, what they say, what anyone says about me. “No,” I insist, “and no one is to say such a thing. It is not that, and the king would be much displeased if you gossiped about me.”

“I was just hoping for the best for you,” Anne defends herself.

I close my eyes. “I need to sleep” is all I say.

I hear Nan chivy everyone from my room and then the shutting of my bedroom door and the rustle of her dress as she sits beside my bed. Without opening my eyes I reach out my hand and she takes it in her comforting grasp.

“Such a terrible day,” I say. “I can’t stop seeing it.”

“I know,” she says. “Try to sleep.”

GREENWICH PALACE,

SUMMER 1545

We make our way back to London in slow stages. The journey, which set out as a summer’s jaunt to see the fleet in triumph, crawls home with a king stunned by disappointment, through a fearful countryside. The fields of dark gold wheat and the springing green of the second growth in the hayfields bring us no pleasure as we look at the prosperous manor houses and the little villages and think they are impossible to defend.