They keep me here, as the winter turns, though my son is in his grave and my boy Geoffrey is left in the Tower. They tell me that he tried to suffocate himself, crushing himself under his bed with the quilt against his face. This is how, it was said, that his cousins the princes in the Tower died, stuffed between two mattresses. But it is not fatal for my son; and perhaps it was not true of the princes either. Geoffrey remains, as he has been for all this winter, a traitor to his king, to his brother, and to himself, a terrible betrayer of his family and me, his mother. They leave him inside the cold walls of the Tower, and I know that if they leave him there long enough he will die anyway, of the cold in winter, or of the plague in summer, and it will hardly matter whether his testimony was true or false because this boy, this boy who promised so much, will be dead. As dead as his brother Arthur, who died in the prime of his handsome youth, as dead as his brother Montague, who died keeping the faith, and trying to save his cousins.

They take Sir Nicholas Carew into the Tower and give it out that he has been planning to destroy the king, seize the throne, and marry his son to Princess Mary. William Fitzwilliam tells me this, his eyes all bright, as if I am going to fall to my knees and say that this has been my secret plan all along.

“Nicholas Carew?” I say disbelievingly. “The king’s Master of Horse? That he has loved and trusted every single day these forty years? His best-loved companion in joust and war since they were boys together?”

“Yes,” William says, the glee fading from his face because he was their companion too, and he knows what folly this is. “The same. Don’t you know that Carew loved Queen Katherine and disagreed with the king about his treatment of the princess?”

I shrug, as if it does not matter much. “Many people loved Queen Katherine,” I say. “The king loved Queen Katherine. Is your Thomas Cromwell going to put every one of her court to death? For that would be thousands of people. And you among them.”

William flushes. “You think you’re so wise!” he blurts out. “But you will come to the scaffold at last! Mark my words, Countess. You will come to the scaffold at last!”

I hold my temper and my words, for I think there is more here than a young man’s frustration at an older woman knowing more than he will ever learn. I look at his face as if I would read the red veins, and the thinning hair, the fat of self-indulgence under the chin, and the petty pout of his face. “Perhaps I will,” I say quietly. “But you can tell your master Cromwell that I am guilty of nothing, and that if he kills me, he kills an innocent woman and that my blood and that of my kinsmen will stain his record for all eternity.”

I look at his suddenly pale face. “And yours too, William Fitzwilliam,” I say. “People will remember that you held me in your house against my will. I doubt that you will hold your house for long.”

All through the cold weather I mourn for my son Montague, for his honesty, for his steadfast honor, and for his companionship. I blame myself for not having valued him before, for letting him think that my love for Geoffrey was greater than my love for all my boys. I wish I had told Montague how dear he was to me, how I depended on him, how I loved watching him grow and rise to his great position, how his humor warmed me, how his caution warned me, that he was a man his father would have been proud of, that I was proud of him, that I still am.

I write to my daughter-in-law, his widow, Jane; she does not reply but she leaves her daughters in my keeping. She has, perhaps, had enough of letters sealed with a white rose. My chamber in the Cowdray tower is small and cramped and my bedroom even smaller, so I insist that my granddaughters walk with me by the cold river in the gardens every day, whatever the weather, and that they ride out twice a week. They are constantly watched in case they send or receive a letter and they become pale and quiet with the caution of habitual prisoners.

Strangely, the loss of Montague recalls the loss of his brother Arthur, and I grieve for him all over again. I am glad in a way that Arthur did not live to see his family’s tragedy and the madness of his former friend, the king. Arthur died in the years of sunshine when we thought everything was possible. Now we are in the cold heart of a long winter.

I dream of my brother, who walked to his death where my son walked to his, I dream of my father who died in the Tower too. Sometimes I just dream of the Tower, its square bullying bulk like a white finger pointing up, accusing the sky, and I think that it is like a tombstone for the young men of my family.

Gertrude Courtenay, now a widow, is still held there, in a freezing cell. The case against her gets worse rather than obscured by time, as Thomas Cromwell keeps finding letters that he says are hers in the rooms of others that he hopes to convict. If Cromwell is to be believed, my cousin Gertrude spent her life writing treason to everyone whom Cromwell suspects. But Cromwell cannot be challenged, since he forges the king’s whims into reality. When Nicholas Carew comes to trial this spring, they produce with a flourish a sheaf of Gertrude’s letters as evidence against him, though no one looks at them closely but Cromwell.

Nicholas Carew, dearest friend to the king, loving courtier to Queen Katherine, loyal constant friend to the princess, goes to the scaffold on Tower Hill, walking in the footprints of my son, and dies like him, for no cause.

Poor Geoffrey, the saddest of all of my boys, living a life worse than death, receives a pardon and is released. His wife is with child at their home, so he staggers out of the postern gate, hires himself a horse, and rides back to her at Lordington. He does not write to me, he sends no message, he does not try to release me, he does not try to clear my name. I imagine that he lives like a dead man, locked inside his failure. I wonder if his wife despises him. I imagine that he hates himself.

This spring I think that I am as low as I have ever been. Sometimes I think of my husband Sir Richard and that he spent his life trying to save me from the destiny of my family and that I have failed him. I did not keep his sons safe, I did not manage to hide my name in his.

“If you were to confess, you would have a pardon and could go free,” Mabel says on one of her regular visits to my little rooms. She comes once a week as if to ensure, like a good hostess, that I have everything I need. In reality, she comes at the bidding of her husband to question me and to torment me with thoughts of escape. “Just confess, your ladyship. Confess and you can go back to your home. You must long to go to your home. You always say that you miss it so much.”

“I do long to be at home, and I would go, if I could,” I say steadily. “But I have nothing to confess.”

“But the charge is almost nothing!” she points out. “You could confess that you once dreamed that the king was not a good king, that’s enough, that’s all they want to hear. That would be a confession of treason under the new law and they could pardon you for it, like they have done Geoffrey, and you could be freed! Everyone that you loved or plotted with is dead anyway. You save nobody by making your life a misery.”

“But I never dreamed such a thing,” I say steadily. “I never thought such a thing or said such a thing or wrote such a thing. I never plotted with any man, dead or alive.”

“But you must have been sorry when John Fisher was executed,” she says quickly. “Such a good man, such a holy man?”

“I was sorry that he opposed the king,” I say. “But I did not oppose the king.”

“Well then, you were sorry when the king put the Dowager Princess Katherine of Aragon aside?”

“Of course I was. She was my friend. I was sorry that their marriage was invalid. But I said nothing in her defense, and I swore the oath to declare it was invalid.”

“And you wanted to serve the Lady Mary even when the king declared that she was a bastard. I know you did, you can’t deny that!”

“I loved the Lady Mary, and I still do,” I reply. “I would serve her whatever her position in the world may be. But I make no claim for her.”

“But you think of her as a princess,” she presses me. “In your heart.”

“I think the king must be the one to decide that,” I say.

She pauses, stands up, and takes a short turn around the cramped room. “I won’t have you here forever,” she warns me. “I’ve told my husband that I can’t house you and your ladies forever. And my lord Cromwell will want to make an end to this.”

“I would be happy to leave,” I say quietly. “I would undertake to stay quietly at my home and see no one and write to no one. I have no sons left to me. I would see only my daughter and my grandchildren. I could promise that. They could release me on parole.”

She turns and looks at me, her face alive with malice, and she laughs outright at the poverty of my hopes. “What home?” she asks. “Traitors don’t have homes, they lose everything. Where do you think you will go? Your great castle? Your beautiful manor? Your fine house in London? None of these is yours anymore. You won’t be going anywhere unless you confess. And I won’t have you here. There’s only one other place for you.”

I wait in silence for her to name the one place in the world that I most dread.

“The Tower.”

THE ROAD TO THE TOWER, MAY 1539

It is a strange, almost dreamlike journey on the water. I am alone in an unmarked barge, as if I have shed my family standards and my name, as if I am at last free from my dangerous inheritance. It is dusk and the sun is setting behind us, laying a long finger of golden light along the river, and the waterbirds are flying to the shore and settling down, splashing and quacking, for the night. I can hear a cuckoo somewhere in the water meadows and I remember how Geoffrey used to listen for the first cuckoo of spring when he was a little boy and we lived with the sisters at Syon. Now the abbey is closed, and Geoffrey is destroyed, and only that faithless bird, the cuckoo, is still calling.