I am horrified. “Have they hurt him?”

She shakes her head. “They’ve not touched his body—but his pride . . .”

“Did he say what they put to him?” Montague asks patiently.

She shakes her head. “Don’t you hear me? He’s raving. He’s in a frenzy.”

“He’s not coherent?”

I can hear the hope in Montague’s voice.

“He’s like a madman,” she says. “He’s praying and crying, and then he suddenly declares that he’s done nothing, and then he says that everyone always blames him, and then he says he should have run away but that you stopped him, that you always stop him, and then he says that he cannot stay in England anyway for the debts.” Her eyes slide to me. “He says that his mother should pay his debts.”

“Could you tell if he has been properly questioned? Has he been charged with any offense?”

She shakes her head. “We have to send him clothes and food,” she says. “He’s cold. There’s no fire in his room, and he has only his riding cape. And he threw that down on the floor and stamped on it.”

“I’ll do that at once,” I say.

“But you don’t know if he has been properly questioned, nor what he has said?” Montague confirms.

“He says that he has done nothing,” she repeats. “He says that they come and shout at him every day. But he says nothing for he has done nothing.”

Geoffrey’s ordeal goes on another day. I send my steward with a parcel of his warm clothes and with orders to buy food from the bakehouse near the Tower and take in a proper meal for my boy, although he comes back and says that the guards took the clothes but he thought they would keep them, and that he was not allowed to order a meal.

“I’ll go with Constance tomorrow, and see if I can command them to take him a dinner at least,” I say to Montague, as I enter the echoing presence chamber at L’Erber. It is empty of anyone, no petitioners, no tenants, no friends. “And she can take in a winter cape and some linen for him, and some bedding.”

He is standing at the window, his head bowed, in silence.

“Did you see the king?” I ask him. “Could you speak to him for Geoffrey? Did he know that Geoffrey is under arrest?”

“He knew already,” Montague says dully. “There was nothing I could say, for he knew already.”

“Cromwell acted with his authority?”

“That we’ll never know. Lady Mother. Because the king didn’t know about Geoffrey from Cromwell. He knew from Geoffrey himself. Apparently, Geoffrey has written to him.”

“Written to the king?”

“Yes. Cromwell showed me the letter. Geoffrey wrote to the king that if the king will order him some comforts, then he will tell all he knows, even though it touches his own mother, or brother.”

For a moment I hear the words but I cannot make out the meaning. Then I understand. “No!” I am horror-struck. “It can’t be true. It must be a forgery. Cromwell must be tricking you! It’s what he would do!”

“No. I saw the note. It was Geoffrey’s hand. I am not mistaken. Those were his exact words.”

“He offered to betray me and you for some warm clothes and a good dinner?”

“It seems so.”

“Montague, he must have lost his mind. He would never do such a thing, he would never hurt me. He must be witless. My God, my poor boy, he must be in a delirium.”

“Let’s hope so,” Montague says spitefully. “For if he is mad, he cannot testify.”

Constance comes back from the Tower supported by two manservants, unable to walk, unable to speak.

“Is he ill?” I take her by the shoulders and stare into her face as if I can see what is wrong with my son by the blank horror of his wife’s expression. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Constance? Tell me?”

She shakes her head. She moans. “No, no.”

“Has he lost his wits?”

She hides her face in her hands and sobs.

“Constance, speak to me! Have they racked him?” I name my worst fear.

“No, no.”

“He doesn’t have the Sweat, does he?”

She raises her head. “Lady Mother, he tried to kill himself. He took a knife from the table and he threw himself on it and stabbed himself nearly to his heart.”

Abruptly, I let her go and grab a tall chair to support myself. “Is it fatal? A fatal wound? My boy?”

She nods. “It’s very bad. They wouldn’t let me stay with him. I saw thick bandages around his chest, they had him strapped twice. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t speak. He was lying on his bed, blood seeping through the bandages. They told me what he had done and he didn’t speak. He just turned his face to the wall.”

“He has seen a physician? They had bandaged him?”

She nods.

Montague comes into the room behind us, his face ghastly, his smile twisted. “A knife from his dinner table?”

“Yes,” she says.

“And did he have a good dinner?”

It is a question so odd, so strange to ask in the middle of this tragedy, that she turns and stares at him.

She does not know what he means; but I do.

“He had a very good dinner, several dishes, and there was a fire in the grate, and someone had sent him new clothes,” she replies.

“Our clothes?”

“No,” she says, bewildered. “Someone had sent him some comforts, new things; but they didn’t tell me who.”

Montague nods and goes from the room without another word, without looking at me.

Next morning, at a quiet breakfast in my chamber, the two of us close together at the little table before my bedroom fire, Montague tells me that his manservant did not come home last night, and nobody knows where he is.

“What d’you think?” I ask quietly.

“I think that Geoffrey has named him as a servant who takes letters and messages for me, and that he has been arrested,” Montague says quietly.

“Son, I cannot believe that Geoffrey would betray us, or any of our people.”

“Lady Mother, he promised the king that he would betray us both for warm clothes, firewood, and a good dinner. He was served a good dinner yesterday and they have taken his breakfast in to him today. Right now he is being questioned by William Fitzwilliam, the Earl of Southampton. He is leading the inquiry. It would have been better for Geoffrey, and better for us, if he had put the knife in his heart and driven it home.”

“Don’t!” I raise my voice to Montague. “Don’t say that! Don’t say that foolish thing. Don’t say that wicked thing. You speak like a child who knows nothing of death. It is never, never better to die. Never think that it is. Son, I know you are afraid. Don’t you think I am too? I saw my brother go into that very Tower and he only came out to his death. My own father died in there, charged with treason. Don’t you think that the Tower is a constant horror to me, and to think that Geoffrey is in there is like the worst of nightmares? And now I think that they might take me? And now I think that they might take you? My son? My heir?” I fall silent at the sight of his face.

“You know, sometimes I think of it as our family home,” he says very quietly, so quietly that I can hardly hear him. “Our oldest and truest family seat. And that the Tower graveyard is our family tomb, the Plantagenet vault where we are all, in the end, going.”

Constance visits her husband again but finds him in a haze of fever from his wound. He is well nursed and well served, but when she goes to see him there is a woman in the room—the one who usually comes to lay out the dead—and a guard at the door and he can say nothing to her in private.