I stand at the stern and look back at the swirling gray waters of the wake and watch the setting sun turning the mackerel sky pink and cream. I have sailed down this river many times in my life; I have been in the coronation barge, as an honored guest, a member of the royal family, I have been in my own barge, under my own standard, I have been the wealthiest woman in England, holding the highest of honors, with four handsome sons standing beside me, each of them fit to inherit my name and my fortune. And now I have almost nothing, and the nameless barge goes quietly down the river unobserved. As the muffled drum sounds and the rowers keep the beat and the barge moves forward with a steady swishing thrust through the water, I feel that it has been like a dream, all of it a dream, and that the dream is coming to an end.

As the dark figure of the Tower comes into sight, the great portcullis of the water gate rolls up at our approach; the Constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, is waiting on the steps. They run out the gangplank and I walk steadily towards him, my head high. He bows very low as he sees me, and I see his face is pale and strained. He takes my hand to help me to the steps, and as he moves forward I see the boy who was hidden behind him. I see him, and I recognize him, and my heart stops still at the sight of him as if I have been jolted awake and I know that this is not a dream but the worst thing that has ever happened in a long, long life.

It is my grandson Harry. It is my grandson Harry. They have arrested Montague’s boy.

He is whooping with joy to see me, that’s what makes me weep as his arms come round my waist and he dances around me. He thinks I have come to take him home, and he is laughing with delight. He tries to board the barge, and it takes me a few moments before I can explain to him that I am imprisoned myself, and I see his little face blench with horror as he tries not to cry.

We grip each other’s hand and go towards the dark entrance together. They are housing us in the garden tower. I fall back and look at Sir William. “Not here,” I say. I will not tell him that I cannot bear to be imprisoned where my brother waited and waited for his freedom. “Not this tower. I cannot manage the stairs. They’re too narrow, too steep. I can’t go up and down them.”

“You won’t be going up and down them,” he says with grim humor. “You’re just going up. We’ll help you.”

They half carry me up the winding circular stair to the first-floor room. Harry has a little room above mine, overlooking the green. I have a larger room, overlooking the green out of one window and the river through a narrow arrow-slit. There is no fire made in either grate, the rooms are cold and cheerless. The walls are bare stone, carved here and there with the names and insignia of previous prisoners. I cannot bear to look for the names of my father or my brother or of my sons.

Harry goes to the window and points out his cousin, Courtenay’s boy, in the narrow streets below. He is housed with his mother Gertrude in the Beauchamp Tower; their rooms are more comfortable, Edward is very bored and very lonely but he and his mother get enough to eat and were given warm clothes this winter. With the high spirits of an eleven-year-old boy, Harry is more cheerful already, pleased that I am with him. He asks me to come to visit Gertrude Courtenay and is shocked when I say that I am not allowed to leave my room, that when he comes in to see me, the door will be locked behind him, and he can only go out when a guard comes to release him. He looks at me, his innocent face frowning, as if he is puzzled. “But we will be able to go home?” he asks. “We will go home soon?”

I am almost brave enough to assure him that he will go home soon. There may be evidence, real or pretend, against Gertrude, they may concoct something against me, but Harry is only eleven and Edward is thirteen years old and there can be nothing against these boys but the fact that they were born Plantagenets. I think even the king cannot be so far gone in his fear of my family as to keep two boys like this in the Tower as traitors.

But then I pause in my confident reckoning, pause and remember that his father took my brother at just this age, for just this reason, and my brother came out only to walk along the stone path, to Tower Hill, to the scaffold.

THE TOWER, LONDON, SUMMER 1539

They produce the dozens of letters that Gertrude is said to have written, they produce one letter which I wrote to my son Reginald to assure him of my love which was never delivered, and then Thomas Cromwell himself lifts a satchel and like a street magician draws out the badge that Tom Darcy gave me, the white silk badge embroidered with the five wounds of Christ with the white rose above it.

The house is silent as Thomas Cromwell flourishes this. Perhaps he hoped that they would clamor in an uproar, shouting for my head. Cromwell offers it as conclusive evidence of my guilt. He does not accuse me of any crime—even now, having an embroidered badge in an old box in your house is not a crime—and the houses of the commons and the lords barely respond. Perhaps they are sated with attainders, perhaps they are weary of death. Perhaps many of them have a badge just like it, tucked away in an old box in their country houses, from the time when they thought that good times might come, and there were many pilgrims marching for grace. At any rate, it is all that Cromwell has for evidence and I am to be kept in the Tower at His Majesty’s wish and my grandson Harry and Gertrude and her little boy must stay too.

THE TOWER, LONDON, WINTER 1539

Only the outside world moves on. Ursula writes to me that Constance and Geoffrey have a baby, to be called Catherine, and that the king is to marry a new wife. They have found a princess who is prepared to marry a man she has never seen and of whom she can only have heard the worst reports. Anne of Cleves is to make the long journey, from her Protestant homeland to the country that the king and Cromwell are destroying, next spring.