“I know,” I say, and hurry onwards.

The front doors are wide open and they have made a line of people passing pails of water up the stairs. Henry is in the stable yard, making them hurry, drawing water from the well, urging the lad to work harder at the pump. It is painfully slow, we can smell the acrid hot smoke on the wind and the bell tolls loudly as the men shout for more water and say that the flames are taking hold. Arthur is there with Sir Richard, his guardian, wearing nothing but his breeches and a cape over his bare shoulders.

“You’ll freeze to death!” I scold him.

“Go and get a jacket from our traveling carts,” Maggie orders him. “They’re not unpacked yet.”

Arthur ducks his head in obedience to her and goes to the stables.

“It’s a terrible fire, in the wardrobe rooms, you’ll lose your gowns, and God knows how many jewels!” Henry shouts at me above the noise. I can hear a crack as the expensive window glass shatters in the heat and then there is a noise like a blast as one of the roof beams caves in and the flames shoot upwards like an explosion.

“Is everyone out of the building?” I shout.

“As far as we can tell,” Henry says. “Except . . . my love, I am sorry . . .” He steps away from the line of men frantically slopping pails of water one to another. “I am so sorry, Elizabeth, but I am afraid the boy is dead.”

I glance behind me. Lady Katherine is there, but the boy has melted into the crowds of people milling around the front doors of the palace, starting back as another roar comes from the fire and flames lick out of an upper window.

“Will you tell her?” Henry asks me. “There is no doubt that he is lost to the blaze. He was sleeping in the wardrobe rooms, of course, and they were locked. It’s where the fire started. We must prepare ourselves for his death. It’s a tragedy, it’s a terrible tragedy.”

Something about Henry alerts me. He is strangely like our son Harry, when he looks at me with his blue eyes as honest and as open as a summer sky and tells me some great fib about his homework, or his sister, or his tutor.

“The boy is dead?” I ask. “He has died in the fire?”

Henry looks down, shrugs his shoulders, heaves a sigh, puts his hand over his eyes as if weeping. “He can’t have got out of that,” he said. “It was raging by the time anyone knew of it, it was like hell.” He puts out his hand to me. “He won’t have suffered,” he says. “Tell her that it would have been merciful and quick. Tell her that we are all so sorry.”

“I’ll tell her what you say,” is all I promise, and I leave my husband to command the men who are bellowing for sand to fling on the flames and “Water! More water!” I walk back to where Lady Katherine is standing with Harry and Margaret beside her.