“But you must,” Nan says to me. “Anne died without admitting that she knew any one of us, so that we would be free to go on thinking, talking, and writing. So that you would carry the torch.”

“She suffered.” It’s not a question. She was in the torture room of the Tower, alone with three men. No woman has ever been there before.

“God bless her. They broke her body so badly that she could not walk to the stake. John Lascelles, Nicholas Belenian, and John Adams were burned at the same time, but the men walked to their pyres. She was the only one tortured. The guards had to carry her tied to a chair. They said her feet were turned in as if she was wearing them backwards, and her shoulders and her elbows were all pulled out. Her spine was disjointed, her neck was pulled from her shoulders.”

I dip my head and I put my hands over my eyes. “God keep her.”

“Amen,” Nan says. “A king’s messenger came to offer her pardon as they tied the chair to the stake.”

“Oh, Nan! Could she have recanted?”

“All they wanted was your name. They would have taken her down if she had said your name.”

“Oh, God forgive me.”

“She listened to the priest preaching the sermon before they brought the torches to set the fire, and she said ‘Amen’ only when she agreed with him.”

“Nan, I should have done more!”

“You couldn’t have done more. Truly, there was nothing more that any of us could do. If she had wanted to escape death, she could have told them what they wanted to hear. They were clear enough with her what it should be.”

“Just my name?”

“All this has been done only so they could name you as a heretic to the king and kill you.”

“They burned her?” It must be a terrible death, tied to a stake with the faggots heaped around your feet, the smell of the smoke as the flames take hold, the sight of family and praying friends dimming as the smoke rises and then the terrible crackle as your hair catches and then your skirt smolders, and then the pain—I break off to rub my eyes—I cannot imagine the pain as a gown catches fire, as sleeves take the flames to the arms, to the shoulders, to her delicate white neck.

“Catherine Brandon sent her a purse of gunpowder and she wore it in her gown. When the flames grew hot it blew off her head. She didn’t have to suffer long.”

“That was all we could do for her? That was the best that we could do?”

“Yes.”

“But she had to let them strap her broken arms and legs to the chair, she had to wear a gunpowder purse around her twisted neck?”