THE TOWER, LONDON, SPRING 1540

Harry grows taller and taller, out of his hose and out of his shoes, and I have to beg the warder to request new clothes for him. We are allowed a fire in our rooms only when it gets very cold, and I see my fingers thicken and redden with chilblains. It grows dark very early in the little rooms, it stays dark for a long time, dawn comes later and later through this cold winter, and when there is a mist coming off the river or the clouds are very low it never gets light at all.

I try to be cheerful and optimistic for Harry’s sake, and read with him in Latin and French; but when he has gone to sleep in his little cell and I am locked in mine, I pull the thin blanket over my head and lie dry-eyed in the fusty darkness and know that I am too beaten by grief to cry.

We wait as spring comes to green the trees in the Tower garden and we can hear the blackbirds singing in the constable’s orchard. The two boys are allowed out on the green to play, and someone sets up a butt for them and gives them bows and arrows; someone else gives them a set of bowls and marks out a green for them. Though the days get warmer, it is still very cold in our rooms, and so I ask the warder to allow me to send for some clothes. I am served by my lady-in-waiting and by the master controller’s maid, and I am ashamed that I cannot pay their wages. The warder presents a petition for me and I receive some clothes and some money, and, then, surprisingly, for no reason, Gertrude Courtenay is released.

William Fitzwilliam himself comes in with the warder to tell me the good news.

“Are we to go too?” I ask him calmly. I put my hand on Harry’s thin shoulder and feel him shudder like a captive merlin at the thought of freedom.

“I am sorry, your ladyship,” Thomas Philips, the warder, says. “There are no orders to release you yet.”

I feel Harry’s shoulders slump, and Thomas sees the look on my face. “Maybe soon,” he says. He turns to Harry. “But you are not to lose your playmate, so you won’t be lonely,” he says, trying to sound cheerful.

“Is Edward not going with his mother?” I ask. “Why would they release Lady Courtenay and keep her little son prisoner?”

As he meets my eyes he realizes, as I do, that this is the imprisonment of the Plantagenets, not of traitors. Gertrude can go for she was born a Blount, the daughter of Baron Mountjoy. But her son, Edward, must stay for his name is Courtenay.

There is no charge, there can be no charge, he is a child and had never even left home. It is the king gathering the Plantagenet sons into his keeping, like the Moldwarp undermining a house, like a monster in a fairy tale, eating children, one by one.

I think of little Harry and Edward, their bright, eager eyes and Harry’s curly auburn hair, and I think of the cold walls of the Tower and the long, long days of captivity, and I find a new level of endurance, of pain. I look at William Fitzwilliam, and I say to him: “As the king wishes.”

“You don’t find this unjust?” he says wonderingly, as if he is my friend and might plead for the boys’ release. “You don’t think you should speak out? Appeal?”

I shrug my shoulders. “He is the king,” I say. “He is the emperor, the supreme head of the Church. His judgment must be right. Don’t you think his judgment is infallible, my lord?”

He blinks at that, blinks like the mole his master, and gulps. “He’s not mistaken,” he says quickly, as if I might spy on him.

“Of course not,” I say.

THE TOWER, LONDON, SUMMER 1540

“And I have news,” she says.

I glance at the door where a jailer may be passing. “Take care what you say,” I remind her.

“Everyone knows this,” she says. “The king is to put his new wife aside though she has been in the country only seven months.”

At once I think of my princess, Lady Mary, who will lose another stepmother and friend. “Put her aside?” I repeat, careful with the words, wondering if she is to be charged with something monstrous and killed.

“They say that the marriage was never a true one,” my maid says, her voice a tiny whisper. “And she is to be called the king’s sister and live at Richmond Palace.”

I know that I look quite blankly at her; but I cannot comprehend a world where a king may call his wife his sister and send her to live on her own in a palace. Is nobody advising Henry at all? Is nobody telling him that the truth is not of his making, cannot be of his own invention? He cannot call a woman wife today, and name her as his sister on the next day. He cannot say that his daughter is not a princess. He cannot say that he is the Pope. Who is ever going to find the courage to name what is more and more clear: that the king does not see the world as it is, that his vision is unreal, that—though it is treason to say it—the king is quite mad.

The very next day I am gazing out of my arrow-slit window over the river when I see the Howard barge come swiftly downriver, and turn, oars feathering expertly to rush into the inner dock as the water gate creaks open. Some poor new prisoner, taken by Thomas Howard, I think, and watch with interest as a stocky figure is wrestled from the barge, fighting like a drayman, and struggles with half a dozen men onto the quay.

“God help him,” I say as he plunges this way and that like a baited bear with no hope of freedom. They have guards ready to fall on him and he fights them, all the way up the steps and out of sight, under the lee of my window as I press against the stone and push my face against the arrow-slit.

I have a solitary prisoner’s curiosity, but also I think I recognize this man who flings himself against his jailers. I knew him the moment that he pitched off the barge, his dark clerkly clothes in the best-cut black, his broad shoulders and black velvet bonnet. I stare down in amazement, my cheek pressed to the cold stone so that I can see Thomas Cromwell, arrested and imprisoned and dragged, fighting, into the same Tower where he has sent so many others.

I fall back from the arrow-slit, and I stagger to my bed and fall to my knees and put my face in my hands. I find I am crying at last, hot tears running between my fingers. “Thank God,” I cry softly. “Thank God who has brought me safe to this day. Harry and Edward are saved, the little boys are safe, for the king’s wicked councillor has fallen, and we will be freed.”

Thomas Philips, the warder, will tell me only that Thomas Cromwell, deprived of his chain of office and all his authority, has been arrested and is held in the Tower, crying for pardon, as so many good men have cried before him. He must hear, as I hear, the sound of them building the scaffold on Tower Hill, and on a day as fine and as sunny as the day they took out John Fisher or Thomas More, their enemy, the enemy of the faith of England, walks in their footsteps and goes to his death.

I tell my grandson Harry and his cousin Edward to keep from the windows and not to look out as the defeated enemy of their family walks through the echoing gate, over the drawbridge, and slowly up the cobbled road to Tower Hill; but we hear the roll of the drums and the jeering roar of the crowd. I kneel before my crucifix and I think of my son Montague predicting that Cromwell, who was deaf to calls for mercy, mercy, mercy, would one day cry out these words, and find none for himself.

I wait for my cell door to be flung open and for us to be released. We were imprisoned on Thomas Cromwell’s Act of Attainder; now that he is dead we shall surely be released.