“Or false gold, fool’s gold, that people mistake for the real thing,” I say stoutly. I find my courage and I face him. “Are you saying that any of my kinsmen or -women, or ladies, are on the list?” Not Margaret! I am thinking desperately. Not Margaret. God send that she has had the patience not to rebel against Henry in the hopes of freeing her brother. Please God none of my kinswomen have played their husbands false for love of a boy that they secretly think is my brother? Not my grandmother, not my aunts, not my sisters! Please God that my mother always refused to speak with them, just as she never spoke to me. Please God that no one I love is on Henry’s list and that I shall not see my own kinsmen and -women on the scaffold.

“Come,” he says suddenly.

Obediently, I rise to me feet. “Where?”

“To my presence chamber,” he says, as if it is the most ordinary thing in the world that he should come to my room to fetch me.

“I?”

“Yes.”

“What for?” Suddenly my rooms seem very empty, the door to the children’s schoolroom is shut, my ladies sent away. Suddenly I realize that the Tower is very quiet and the prisons for traitors are just a half a dozen steps away, as Henry reminded me just a moment ago. “What for?”

“You can come and see Clifford brought before me. Since you are so astute about whose name might or might not be in his bag of seals, since you are casting doubt on it, you can see it for yourself.”

“It’s a matter for you and your lords,” I say, hanging back.

He puts out his hand, his face quite determined. “You had better come,” he says. “I don’t want people observing your absence and thinking anything of it.”

I put my hand in his, feeling how cold he is as he grips me, and I wonder if it is fear that makes his fingers so icy. “Whatever you wish,” I say steadily, wondering if I can get a message to Margaret, if anyone in the presence chamber will be close enough for me to whisper a request that she bring me something, a shawl or a cape against the cold of the room. “My ladies must come with me.”

“Some of them are there already,” he says. “I particularly wanted them to be there. Some of them have to be there, some of them have questions to answer. You will be surprised at how many people are waiting for us. For you.”

We enter the presence chamber of the Tower hand in hand as if we are in a procession. It is a long room that runs the length of the Tower, dark as it is lit only by narrow windows at either end, crowded this afternoon with people pressing themselves back against the cold walls to leave a space before the banked fire for the table, the great chair, the cloth of estate hung high over the chair. My Lady the King’s Mother stands on one side of the empty throne, her husband Lord Thomas Stanley beside her, his brother Sir William beside him. She has my sisters Cecily and Anne beside her, and Margaret my cousin is there too. Maggie shoots me one frightened look, her eyes dark, and then drops her gaze to the ground.