His guards were friendly. They lingered often in his cell and talked to him; they had made his life more tolerable than it might have been; his food was good and well served and he believed this was due to the guards.

But sometimes he was in acute despair.

“If only I could get out,” he would say. “I’d go away. I’d leave England. I should never want to see this place again.”

The two guards were sympathetic.

“Well, there is the poor Earl just there.” The guards pointed vaguely at the wall. “He’s been here for nigh on fourteen years. Think of that!”

“For what reason?”

One of the guards lifted his shoulders and coming a step closer whispered: “For no reason but that he is the son of his father.”

“Oh . . . of the Duke of Clarence, you mean?”

“Died in this same place . . . Drowned in a butt of malmsey . . . helped himself . . . or others helped him to too much wine.”

Perkin shivered. “And his son has been here ever since the King came to the throne?”

The guards were becoming very confidential. “Well, he’s got a right, hasn’t he?”

“A right?”

One of them made a circle around his head and winked. “Wouldn’t do for him to be around having more right to it . . . some say. Well, it stands to reason. . . .He has to be kept away . . . under lock and key, don’t he?”

Perkin was thoughtful. Only a short distance from him was a young man who had a real claim to the throne. He had made no attempt to rise against the Tudor . . . and yet here he was . . . condemned to be a prisoner all his life maybe.

All his life! Perkin grew cold at that thought. Was that what was intended for him?

“You and the Earl,” said the guard . . .“you’d have a lot in common wouldn’t you? If you liked to write a note to him . . . I’d see he got it.”

“What should I write to him about?”

The guard shrugged his shoulders. “That’s for you. I thought two young men . . . here . . . so near and can’t see each other. I reckon the Earl would like to get a note from you . . . and you’d like to get one from him.”

Perkin shook his head.

The guard went out. His fellow guard was waiting for him.

“He don’t take to the idea,” he said. “He’ll need a bit of working on.”

But Perkin did take to the idea. He thought about the lonely Earl and he felt that if he could pour out his thoughts on paper it would relieve his feelings considerably. He would like to tell someone who could understand, how he had been drawn into posing as the son of a king and how he might so easily have become a king if his luck had gone the other way. It was not that he wanted to be a king; all he asked now was to rejoin his wife and child. That was all he asked but the King would not grant it and kept them apart. If Katharine could come and live with him in the Tower he was sure she would.

He asked the guard for paper and a pen to write. He should have been suspicious of the alacrity with which it was produced.

The Earl was equally glad to enliven his days in correspondence with his fellow prisoner. He told Perkin that he had heard something of him. News came now and then to the prisoners in the Tower—snippets of it . . . and then long silences so that one never really got the real story. Perkin told him what had happened to him and the Earl was eager to know more. Poor young man, he had been so long in the Tower that he knew very little of the outside world.

Perkin wrote of the freedom he longed to obtain, of Katharine waiting for him. All his thoughts were of freeing himself and getting away. . . . Escape from this fearful place, he wrote. Freedom. That is what I crave for.

The Earl craved for it too. “Am I to spend all my life a prisoner?” he wrote.

The guards who read the letters and gave them to the constable who showed them to the King before they were passed on to the intended recipient, said: “We are getting somewhere.”

“They were right. In time the two young men began to write about means of escape. How could they achieve it? “The guards are friendly,” wrote Perkin. “I have an idea that they would help us. There must be many prisoners in the Tower—many of them guiltless. It might be possible to get them to help us . . . It would be freedom for them as well as for us.”