Then I rise from the table and tell them that I am accustomed to praying at this time, in my family chapel. We pray here in the new way, and there is a Bible in English for anyone to read. After prayers, we will dine. If they lack anything in their rooms, they must ask, and I shall be delighted to ensure their comfort.

A pedlar with Christmas fairings coming from the London goose fair tells the maids at the kitchen door that my cousin Sir Edward Neville has been arrested and so has Montague’s chaplain John Collins, the Chancellor of Chichester Cathedral, George Croftes, a priest, and several of their servants. I tell the maid who whispers this to me to buy whatever fairings she likes and not to listen to gossip. This is nothing to do with us.

We serve a good dinner to our guests, and after the dinner we have carol singing and my ladies and maids dance, then I excuse myself and go outside as the sky is turning gray, to walk around the ricks. It comforts me, when my precious sons are in danger, to see that the straw and the hay are battened down against the winds, and that everything is dry and safe. I step into the barn, the cows shifting quietly among the straw at one end and my valuable handsome tup at the other, and I smell the scent of warm animals safely penned up against cold weather. I wish I could stay here, all night, in the light of the little horn lantern with the quiet breathing of animals, and perhaps on Christmas Eve at midnight I would see them kneel in memory of that other stable, where the animals knelt at the crib and the Light of the World founded the Church which I have honored all my life and which is not, and has never been, under the command of any king.

Next day, William and the bishop come to my room again and ask me the same questions. I give them the same answers, and they carefully write them down and send them to London. We can do this every day until the end of the world and the harrowing of hell. I am never going to say anything that would throw suspicion on either of my imprisoned sons. It is true that I am weary of my inquisitors and their repeated questions, but I will not fail because of weariness. I will not be putting my head on the block and desiring eternal rest. They can ask me until the dead step out of their graves, they will find me as mute as my headless brother. I am an old woman, sixty-five years old now, but I am not ready for the grave, and I am not so weak as to be bullied by men whom I knew as toddlers. I will say nothing.

In the Tower, the prisoners wait too. The newly arrested churchmen break down and acknowledge that although they swore the king’s oath they never believed in their hearts that Henry was supreme head of the Church. They promise that they did nothing more than break their own hearts over their false swearing; they raised neither money nor men, they did not plot nor speak. Silently, they wished for the restoration of the monasteries and the return of the old ways. Innocently, they prayed for better times.

Edward Neville, my cousin, did only a little more than they. Once, only once, he told Geoffrey that he wished the princess could come to the throne and Reginald could come home. Geoffrey tells the inquisitors of this exchange. God forgive him, my beloved, false-hearted, fainthearted son tells them what his cousin once said, in confidence, years ago, speaking to a man whom he trusted as a brother.

My cousin Henry Courtenay cannot be charged for they can find nothing against him. He may have spoken with Neville, or with my son Montague; but neither of them says anything about any conversation, and they confess nothing themselves. They remain true to each other, as kinsmen should. Neither one says anything about the other, nor confesses anything on his own account. Not even when they are told that the other has betrayed him. They smile like the true chivalric lords they are, they know a lie when it is told against the honor of their family. They keep their silence.

Of course, my cousin Henry’s wife Gertrude was well known to have visited the Holy Maid of Kent and to pity Queen Katherine; but she has already been pardoned for this. Still, they keep her a prisoner and question her every day as to what the Maid of Kent told her about the death of the king and the failure of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Her son Edward lives in a little room beside hers and is allowed a tutor and to take exercise in the gardens. I think this is a good sign that they plan to release him soon, for surely they would not keep him at his lessons if they did not think he would someday go to university?

All that they have against Henry Courtenay is one sentence; he is recorded as saying: “I trust to see a merry world one day.” When I hear this, I go to my chapel and put my head in my hands to think of my cousin Henry hoping for a merry world one day, and that this commonplace optimism should be cited as evidence against him.

As I kneel before the altar, I think, God bless you, Henry Courtenay; and I cannot disagree. God bless you, Henry, and all prisoners who are held for their faith and for their beliefs, wherever they are tonight. God bless you, Henry Courtenay, for I think as you did, and Tom Darcy did. Like you, I still hope for a merry world one day.

Even before my son and his cousin Henry Courtenay come to trial they put Lord Delaware into the Tower for refusing to sit on a jury to try them. There is nothing against him, not even a whisper, nothing that Thomas Cromwell can invent; Delaware simply shows his distaste for these trials. He swore he would not try another old friend after sending Tom Darcy to the scaffold, and now he refuses to sit in judgment on my son. They hold him as a prisoner for a day or two, scouring London for gossip against him, and then they have to release him to his house and command him to stay indoors.

Of course I cannot go to him, I cannot even send a message to thank him while my own inquisitors sit with me between breakfast and dinner and ask me over and over again if I remember eighteen years ago, when Montague said something while walking in the garden with Henry Courtenay, if the clerk of my kitchens Thomas Standish sang songs of hope and rebellion. If anybody mentioned Maytime. If anyone said that May would never come. But my stable boy runs an errand for me to L’Erber, and when Lord Delaware is walking in his garden the next day, he finds, flung over the garden wall and lying in his path, a white rosebud made of silk, and he knows that I am grateful to him.

“I am afraid, Countess, that you are to be my guest,” William says to me at dinner.

“No,” I say. “I have to stay here. There is much work to be done on an estate this large, and my presence here keeps the country calm.”

“We’ll have to take that risk,” the bishop says, smiling at his own humor. “For you are to be imprisoned at Cowdray. You can keep them calm in Sussex. And please, do not be troubled about your estate and your goods, for we are seizing them.”

“My home?” I ask. “You are seizing Warblington Castle?”

“Yes,” William says. “Please be ready to leave at once.”

I think of Hugh Holland’s white face as his horse was dragged from Bockmer to London with him strapped to the saddle. “I shall need a litter,” I say. “I cannot ride all that way.”

“You can ride pillion behind my commander,” William says coldly.

“William Fitzwilliam, I am old enough to be your mother, you should not treat me so harshly,” I suddenly burst out, and then I see the quickening of interest in his face.