The messenger comes by barge, swiftly down the river in the midnight darkness, rowed as fast as the oarsmen can go against the in-running tide, from Whitehall. It’s a cold wet journey and the guards take his dripping cape at the entrance of my presence chamber and throw open the doors. One of my ladies, wakened by the hammering on the door of the privy chamber, comes running in to me to say there is an urgent message from the Privy Council at Whitehall and will I receive it?

I am afraid at once, as everyone in this court has learned to fear the uninvited knock on the door. At once I wonder who is in danger, at once I wonder if they have come for me. I throw on my thickest winter robe and go out, my bare feet in my gold-heeled shoes, to my privy chamber, where one of the Seymour men is waiting, shifting from one damp footprint to another, dripping rain on the floor. Nan comes after me and my ladies-in-waiting open their chamber doors and peer out, white-faced in the torchlight. Someone crosses herself; I see Nan grit her teeth, fearing bad news.

The messenger kneels to me and pulls off his hat. “Your Majesty,” he says. Something in the appalled shock of his face, in the way he takes a breath as if to make a well-rehearsed speech, the lateness of the hour, the darkness of the night, warns me what he is going to say. I look over his shoulder to see if the yeomen of the guard have come in numbers to arrest me. I wonder if the royal barge is bobbing at the pier showing no lights. I look for the courage inside myself to face this moment. Perhaps now, tonight, they have finally come for me.

He gets to his feet. “Your Majesty, I regret to tell you, His Majesty the king is dead.”

* * *