“You can come in,” I say shortly. I am alone, seated on a chair at the window, looking outwards to the river that my mother loved, listening to the low buzz of talk from my rooms behind me, and the distant cry of the seagulls over the water as they swoop and wheel, their white wings very bright against the gray of the sky.

She looks around the empty room for a companion and sees that I am solitary, though a queen is never on her own.

“Can I sit with you?” she asks, her pale face like a desolate child’s. “Forgive me, I cannot bear to be alone.”

She is wearing black again, anticipating widowhood. I feel a swift unfair pang of envy; she can show her grief, but I, about to lose a cousin and the boy who said he was my brother, have to maintain the illusion of normality in a Tudor-green dress with a smiling face. I cannot recognize the boy in death any more than I could in life.

“Come in,” I say.

She enters and pulls up a stool to sit beside me. She has her lace making with her, his beautiful white collar is almost complete, but for once her hands are still. The collar is nearly made but the throat that it was going to encircle will wear a rope halter instead. She looks from her work to me and she sighs, and leaves it aside.

“Lady Margaret Pole has arrived,” she remarks.

“Maggie?”

She nods. “She went straight to the king to ask for mercy for her brother.”

I don’t ask her what the king said. We wait until I hear the challenge at the presence chamber door, the opening of the inner doors, the embarrassed silence that falls as Margaret crosses my privy chamber and the women watch her pass by to my bedroom door. No one can find anything to say to a woman whose brother is to be executed for treason. Then she taps on the door, and I rise up and in a moment we are holding each other, clinging together and looking into the other’s strained face.

“His Grace says there is nothing he can do,” Margaret remarks. “I went down on my knees to him. I laid my face on his shoe.”

I put my wet cheek against hers. “I asked him too, Lady Katherine as well. He is decided. I don’t see what we can do but wait.”

Margaret releases me and sinks to a stool beside me. Nobody says anything, there is nothing to say. The three of us, still hoping like fools, clasp hands and say nothing.

It grows dark, but I don’t call for candles; we let the gray light seep into the room and we sit in the twilight. Then I hear a knock on the outer door, and the ring of riding boots on the floor, and one of my ladies peeps around the bedroom door to say: “Will you see the Marquis of Dorset, Your Grace?”