“That’s no riddle,” she says with bitter humor. “Your husband has passed a law which makes you a criminal fit for burning. Why would he do that?”

I am slow to say it. “He wants to get rid of me?”

She is silent.

“Are you saying that this new law is directed against me, since they cannot catch me with anything else? Are you suggesting that they have outlawed the Bible just to make me and my ladies into criminals? So that they can come against us and charge us with heresy? Because this is ridiculous.”

I cannot read the expression on her face—she does not look like herself—and then I realize that she is afraid. Her mouth is working as if she cannot speak, her forehead is damp with sweat. “He’s coming for you” is all she says. “This is how he always does it. He’s coming for you, Kat, and I don’t know how to save you. I’m packing Bibles and I’m burning papers, but they know you have been reading and writing, and they are changing the law ahead of me. I can’t make sure you obey the law because they are changing it faster than we can obey. I don’t know how to save you. I swore to you that you would outlive him, and now his health is failing, but he is coming for you just like...”

I release her hands and sit back on my heels.

“Just like what?”

“Just like he came for the other two.”

She knots the cords around the box and goes to the door and shouts for her manservant, a man who has been with us all our lives. She gestures to the boxes and commands him to take them at once, show them to no one, and ride for home, for Kendal in Westmorland. As I watch him lift the first box, I realize I am longing to go with him into those wild hills.

“They’ll pick him up at Islington village if they want to,” I say, as the man shoulders the trunk and goes. “He won’t get more than a day’s ride out of the city.”

“I know that,” she says flatly. “But I don’t know what else to do.”

I look at my sister, who has served six of Henry’s queens and buried four. “You really think he is doing this to entrap me? That he has completely turned against me?”

She doesn’t answer. She turns the same closed face to me that I imagine she showed to little Kitty Howard when she cried that she had done nothing wrong; to Anne Boleyn when she swore that she could talk her way out of danger. “I don’t know. God help us all, Kateryn, because I don’t know.”

HAMPTON COURT PALACE,

SUMMER 1546