I pinch the inside of his sleeve, the inner part of his elbow. “Not here. Not now,” I remind him. I smile up at him. “Is that the pole star? Is that the one that you steer by?”

“Are you in danger now?” he demands.

“Not now,” I say.

“Edward says that you were within a hairbreadth of arrest.”

I tip my head back and laugh. “Oh, yes! I saw the warrant.”

His gaze is admiring. “You talked yourself to safety?”

I think of my stretching my lips to the bloodstained riding whip. I think of the ivory satin codpiece thrust into my mouth, banging against my teeth. “No. It was worse than that.”

He makes a little exclamation. “God—”

“Hush!” I say rapidly. “We’re not safe. Everyone is watching. What’s going to happen to the Howards?”

“Whatever he wants.” He takes two impatient steps on the spot, as if he would fling himself out of the room but remembers that there is nowhere that he can go. “Whatever he wants, of course. I expect he will kill them. They were planning treason, without a doubt.”

“God help them,” I say, though they would have sent me to the scaffold. “God help them.”

The double doors are flung open and the king’s enormously bandaged foot comes in first, his great chair and his beaming smile next.

“God help us all,” Thomas says, and steps back like the courtier he is, so that my husband can be wheeled towards his possession, his chattel, his smiling wife.

* * *

Father and son, Thomas Howard and his son Henry, wait in the Tower to hear what charges they will face. No one visits them, no one speaks up for them. Suddenly this old man and his heir, who ruled all of Norfolk, and owned most of the South of England, who rode at the head of thousands of men, who lived their lives like fat spiders in a network of friendships, kinship and obligations, know no one. They are completely friendless and without allies. The evidence of treason against Henry Howard is overwhelming. He was fool enough to boast that he had a great claim to the throne. His own sister Mary Howard, still smarting from his command that she must whore herself out to the king, accuses him. She swears on oath that he ordered her to marry Thomas Seymour to get to court, and to become the king’s mistress. She told him that she would rather cut her throat than be so dishonored. Now she is cutting his.

Even his father’s mistress, the notorious Bess Holland, gives evidence against him. The young man, well hated by those who should love and protect him, is incriminated daily by his friends and lovers, and finally by his own coat of arms, which Thomas Wriothesley, son of a herald, grandson of a herald, declares has been fraudulently based on the arms of Hereward the Wake—a leader of England five hundred years ago.