NICOLA CORNICK is a historian and author. She studied at London University and Ruskin College Oxford and works for the National Trust as a guide at the seventeenth-century hunting lodge Ashdown House in Oxfordshire. Her award-winning books are international bestsellers and have been translated into 26 languages.

For old friends, and remembering Flagstone Farm andan evening of remarkable plotting.

‘Time, the thief.’

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Copyright

Chapter 1

Alison, Marlborough, Wiltshire, the present day

She saw the portrait quite by chance, or so she thought.

It was eight weeks to Christmas and the rain sodden streets of Marlborough already glistened in the gaudy light of the decorations that were strung from buildings and lampposts. The wind was strong that night and the illuminations swung back and forth scattering shadows and shards of colour over the late-night shoppers below. A Victorian market was being held in the town square and the air was thick with the smell of grilled sausages and hot soup. It made Alison feel hungry.

She put her head down and increased her pace against the fine rain that slicked the pavements. She hated this sort of faux historical event with rosy, smiling stallholders dressed up in costume. Beneath the crinolines and jackets they had on their thermal vests and long johns to guard against the cold. They had waterproof boots and raincoats. They thought this play-acting was fun, a jolly celebration of Christmas past.

She remembered past Christmases very differently; the bone sharp cold, the damp, the chilblains and the hunger that had hollowed her stomach. Even though she had been trapped in the present day for so long now that time had started to blur, some of her past she could remember with utter clarity. Pain, sickness, violence, death, had been a raw reality. Someone thrust a toffee apple under her nose in an invitation to buy, and she shuddered and turned away, picking up her pace along the pavement.

There was a creaking noise high above her, a flap as the wind caught the edge of an inn sign and set it swinging.

The White Hart.

She stared at the image of the majestic white stag as it swayed backwards and forwards in the wind. Its head was raised proudly. Around its neck was a golden crown. It was strange how the most potent and magical of Savernake Forest’s symbols survived into this brash and modern world. There were traces of history everywhere; in street names, on inn signs, in old tracks and ancient hedgerows, buried walls and tumbled gravestones. Scratch the surface and it was there.

Alison had seen a white hart in the forest once. Her cousin Edward Seymour had said that the Queen had wanted to come to hunt it, the hart being the ultimate hunter’s trophy and Elizabeth being a queen who collected such things. Perhaps she had come to Wolf Hall after Alison had left. She did not know. There was no record of a royal visit but then so much fell through the cracks of the past.

The fresh blast of air from the Downs to the north brought with it a softer scent, of mingled herbs and flowers, wild garlic, basil and lavender, taking Alison straight back to a long-lost summer in the garden at Wolf Hall and the smell of sun-warm brick and hot grass. She had not been happy in those days but still the sense of loss and dislocation hit her fiercely and gave her no time to prepare. There was too much that was familiar here in Marlborough—the town, the inn, the memories. She should have realised that coming back to Wiltshire was a bad idea. But she had had so little choice.

Breathe. Accept. Wait.

The wave of dizziness and nausea retreated a little. Alison found she was leaning against a wall between two shops, rather like a drunk steadying himself as he tried to weave his way home late at night. Awareness returned to her, the smooth coldness of a drainpipe against her clutching fingers, the chill sting of the rain and the heavy, greasy smell of the street market.

She was standing in front of a shop she had not seen before. High street shops came and went, of course, and it was a good ten years since she had been in Marlborough, maybe more. She tried not to count most of the time.

The shop was actually an art gallery, all high-tech lighting and huge windows, its modernity blaringly incongruous in the middle of Marlborough High Street’s olde-worlde charm. Most of the paintings Alison could see through the window were equally strident, highly coloured, swirling patterns in oil with huge price tags and no artistic merit in her opinion. Not that she knew much about art. She drew for pleasure and had done since she was a child, but she had no training and no technique to speak of.

To the right of the enormous bow window was a pastoral scene with a spotlight trained on it. It might have been an antique. Alison could not really tell. Below the canvas ran a broad white shelf that stretched along the full length of the showroom. There were a number of smaller paintings displayed there, mainly portraits, and she knew at once that they were old, sixteenth century, to judge from the style and the type of clothing. There was King Henry VIII, painted at the moment his glorious, golden youthfulness was changing into something more watchful and inimical. When Alison had been a child, his name had been used to frighten them all into obedience: ‘Behave yourself or old King Hal will come to get you.’ When she had been young she had had no idea what he had looked like but her imagination had supplied the image of a monster. She had seen hundreds of pictures of him since, of course. The English were proud of their infamous, spouse-murdering monarch. Distance had lent the sort of affection to his memory that had never been felt in her own time.

It was odd seeing Henry now, a relic, a throwback to her past. It unsettled her.

Alison’s gaze travelled on to the next portrait on the shelf, that of a woman, standing, her hands folded demurely in that style so beloved of artists who wanted to persuade the viewer that Tudor womanhood was modest and decorous. The display light cast a shadow across her face. Alison strained closer to see. This was no one as instantly recognisable as Henry and yet there was a familiarity about her. It was a face she knew.

Mary Seymour.

Alison’s breath stopped. There was a tight pain in her chest and a buzzing in her ears. Mary. After all this time.

She had never given up hope. It wasn’t in her nature to despair although she had come very close to it so many times. All the history books—those that mentioned Mary Seymour at all—said that she had died as a child. Alison had known that was not true but she had never discovered what had happened to Mary after she had left Wolf Hall.

‘Help me,’ she had said to Mary all those years ago. ‘Help me to find my son. I’ll come back for him. Leave me word…’

She had not begged, precisely; her relationship with Mary had been too prickly to allow her to show that vulnerability. She had phrased it as an order, but Mary had known. There had been a bargain between them. She had helped Mary escape Wolf Hall and, in return, Mary had promised to help her.

Mary was the key to finding Arthur. She always had been and so Alison had held tenaciously to the belief that one day she would see Mary again.

And now she had.

Suddenly she felt faint with shock, trembling, tears pricking her eyes.

‘Are you all right?’ Someone was addressing her, a woman with a plastic rain hat and an anxious expression. She spoke in the tones of someone who feels obliged to offer help but sincerely hopes it isn’t going to be needed. Alison forced a smile.

‘I’m fine, thanks. I tripped over the edge of the pavement and winded myself for a moment.’

The woman’s sharp gaze scanned her face.

She thinks I’m drunk, Alison thought. She took a deep breath and pinned the smile on tighter. ‘No harm done,’ she said. ‘Thanks for stopping to check.’

‘Well, if you’re sure… The woman was already moving away, duty done.

Alison found that her hand was resting against the windowpane as though reaching out to touch the portrait within. She let it fall to her side and straightened up, pushing open the door and stepping from the dark street into the bright interior of the gallery. For a moment the harsh light dazzled her. Out of it came the figure of a man, summoned by the bell on the door. He was elderly, greying, with a stoop and leather elbow patches on his tweed jacket, but his eyes were bright, vivid blue, and he seemed to crackle with life and energy. Alison felt it at once, that force of personality that some people seemed to project effortlessly, lighting up everything around them.

‘Can I help you?’ He sounded surprised that anyone should have dropped in on a wet December evening.

‘That portrait of a lady,’ Alison said. ‘The Tudor one…’

‘Beautiful, isn’t it,’ the man said.

Alison was taken aback. Had Mary been beautiful? Perhaps she had, although Alison had never thought so. She was the one whom men had admired. She had been curves to Mary’s angles, rose to her sallow. She looked at the portrait again, trying to be dispassionate and to ignore the stirrings of old jealousy. She had never liked Mary. In the beginning she had hated her with a child’s simple hatred. That had grown into a more complicated set of emotions as she grew up, but they had never been friends. They had been too different and too far apart.

The woman in the picture had features that were neat rather than beautiful: a long nose but delicate and not disproportionately so, arched brows above eyes of an indeterminate dark colour, a slight smile on the pursed pink lips. There was only the faintest hint of the hair colour beneath her Tudor gable hood though Alison knew it to be red brown, like her mother’s. Mary’s gown was of sumptuous gold and green velvet embroidered with pearls. She looked to be a woman of substance. There were pearls too on the hood and a space where one was missing. That was typical of Mary. She would not have noticed.

She realised that the man was waiting patiently for the question she had not yet articulated.

‘It’s lovely,’ she agreed. ‘The artist must have been very talented.’

She saw him smile and realised that she had not quite been able to repress the spite. Mary, grown up, or at least on the cusp of womanhood, made her as jealous as Mary the child had once done.

She sighed. None of that mattered. What was important was that Mary had survived. Thrived, in fact, by the look of it. And that was good because Mary was the key. Mary had promised to leave word of Arthur for her, and Mary never broke her promises.

Alison felt it again then, the dizziness that was a mixture of hope and terror. She could not let herself believe that this time she would find Arthur. The crash of despair that had followed each time she had failed had been almost too much to bear.

‘... unidentified.’ She realised that the man had been speaking all the time that she had been lost in the turbulence of her thoughts.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Did you say that the artist has not been identified or the sitter has not been identified?’

Now he was looking at her with concern. She caught a glance of herself in the mirrored wall behind the sales desk, all wet rat’s tails hair and pallid complexion. No wonder he was fidgeting with the display in front of him, fussily moving an ugly ceramic vase two inches to the left whilst he waited for her to take herself off. She could hardly fit the profile of a potential customer.

‘The artist is unknown,’ he repeated patiently. ‘The sitter is Anne Boleyn.’

‘No,’ Alison said. She cleared her throat. ‘Sorry, but that isn’t Anne Boleyn. It’s Mary Seymour.’

‘It is Anne Boleyn.’ The man was still smiling in a rather determined fashion. He was charming. She didn’t deserve such tolerance. ‘Tudor portraits aren’t my forte,’ he said, ‘but I do know that this is a newly discovered portrait of Anne, authenticated only recently.’ He pointed to the background of the painting. It was dark and the shapes drawn there were difficult to decipher. ‘Can you see the box?’ he asked. ‘It has her initials on it.’ Then, as Alison frowned, leaning forward to peer into the depths of the picture: ‘AB. For Anne Boleyn.’

The box. Her box.

Alison could see it, now that he had pointed it out. It sat on a ledge to the right of Mary’s head, only the very faintest sheen on its patina showing in the dark background. It would have been easy to miss, this clue, this promise.

‘See, Alison, I did not forget you. I have your workbox here, safe for you.’

She looked back at Mary’s painted face, at the slight sideways glance that led the viewer’s gaze to the wooden box and the bold initials. It had been made of walnut, she remembered, worn smooth over the years by the touch of her fingers. She had loved that box, storing any number of inconsequential items in it: her thimble, a length of ribbon, and a scrap of lace. She might have kept Edward’s love notes in it had he written her any, but he had not.

‘My godson could tell you more about it,’ the man said. ‘He was the one who discovered the portrait. He’s written a book about it. He’s speaking at the festival tomorrow night.’

‘Festival?’ Alison said. She tried to get a grip. She felt strange, jittery. Although the shop was almost aggressively modern she felt closer to the past than she had done in years, disorientated and confused.

‘There’s a literary festival running all week,’ the man said. ‘Adam—my godson—is talking about the painting and about the Tudor court.’ He nodded towards Mary, serene under the dazzling lights. ‘It’s all very exciting. Apparently, there aren’t many portraits of Anne Boleyn.’

‘And this isn’t one of them, I’m afraid,’ Alison said. Rain was seeping down her neck, making her shiver. Or perhaps the shivers were coming from elsewhere, somewhere far deeper inside.

There was a pile of flyers for the talk spread in an artful fan on the white shelf beside the portrait. She bent to pick one up.

‘Adam Hewer,’ she read. ‘“Historian author and presenter, unveils the face of Anne Boleyn. Don’t miss this exciting event, exclusive to the Marlborough Festival.”’ There was a picture of a book cover for Discovering Anne Boleyn and a photograph of the author:

Adam.

Alison sat down abruptly in a flimsy-looking white plastic chair that she thought was probably part of an art installation. It creaked.

‘You look quite done up,’ the gallery owner said kindly. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea? It helps, you know.’

‘I’m fine,’ Alison said automatically. ‘Just a bit tired.’

Odd that it should be Adam, of all people, who should be the one to lead her to Mary. Or perhaps it was not odd at all. That sense of time shifting, the lure of the brightly lit window, the portrait… It had not happened by chance. When it came to fate and time she did not believe in coincidence.

She needed to think. She had to get away from the bright lights that were making her head ache with the buzz of too many discoveries, made too quickly. She dropped the flyer back down on the shelf where the edges curled up slightly in the heat of the lights.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’ve been very kind but I’d better go now.’

‘Alison?’

Adam’s voice stopped her when she was two steps away from the door. She turned slowly. It had not occurred to her that he might be there, listening, and now she felt a prickle of annoyance that he had not made his presence known sooner.

He looked older than she remembered, but not by much. It was a good ten years since they had met but annoyingly Adam seemed to have aged better than she felt she had. He was tall, well built, with brown eyes that were a startling contrast to his fair hair, and had an air of restless energy that was familiar to her. With a sudden tug of the heart she realised he had become the man she had glimpsed in the boy she had known.

After they had split up, she had shied away from following Adam’s career, although she did know that he was one of the new generation of TV historians, celebrity academics who travelled to exotic places to present the past in new and vibrant ways. As a breed they were young, good-looking, photogenic and formidably bright. Apparently, they made history accessible. That had always felt a painful irony to her. History was not accessible at all; at least she did not find it to be.

Adam came out of the office at the back and into the bright lights of the gallery, casual, hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers. ‘I thought it was you,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

He was smiling. Alison remembered the public-school charm, so like that of his godfather, which could smooth over the most awkward of encounters. It had bowled her over when first they had met reminding her painfully of the life she had left behind. She had clung to something that felt familiar in an alien world only to find that there was no similarity between Adam and the men she had known in her past.

Now she felt a disconcerting echo of that teenage confusion and she was cross with herself because there was a flutter in the pit of her stomach and a whisper of what might have been. Stupid, because what might have been had already happened: a youthful affair that had burned itself out.

‘I’m good, thanks,’ she said, matching his effortless courtesy with what felt like abject gaucheness. ‘Just down here for a few days. I work in London now. But you—’ She gestured awkwardly towards the flyers. ‘You’re doing well. TV shows, writing…’

She knew she sounded inane but he merely inclined his head. ‘Thanks.’

‘It’s what you always wanted.’

She saw a flicker of expression in his eyes then, gone too quick to read. He said nothing. Alison was starting to feel hot and anxious. It had been a stupid thing to say. She knew nothing of what Adam wanted these days. She had barely known him ten years before and if she had realised she was going to meet him again today she would have been better prepared.

Butterflies fluttered again, trapped, beneath her breastbone. She needed to give herself some time and space to think. Adam’s godfather—in an unusual breach of courtesy, Adam had not introduced him—had moved away, pretending to rearrange the paperwork on the sales desk, but she knew he was listening, wondering.

‘Well…’ She waved a vague hand towards the door. ‘I really must go. Good luck for the talk tomorrow. Not that you’ll need it, of course.’

‘I heard what you were saying,’ Adam said, ignoring her words. ‘You don’t think this is a portrait of Anne Boleyn.’

Alison felt a sharp pang of disappointment, followed swiftly by a sort of anger at her own obtuseness. This was why Adam had come out to speak to her. It was not because he had wanted to see her. It was because she had raised questions about his work. The anger pricked her into speech.

‘It’s a portrait of Mary Seymour,’ she said, ‘the daughter of Katherine Parr and Thomas Seymour.’

Adam paused for a moment, studying her face. There was a tight frown between his brows now. Alison waited for him to contradict her. She was already regretting her words; she should have gone back to the hotel, thought about what had happened, decided on what she should do next, rather than blurt out a statement that would only make Adam want to know more.

‘I thought Mary Seymour died as a child?’ Adam said.

Kudos to Adam, Alison thought. Most people had never heard of Mary Seymour, let alone knew what had happened to her. She did not know herself. Until tonight her search for Mary had drawn a blank. She had hunted her through books, archives, museums and galleries and had found next to nothing. Mary’s had been a life almost completely lost from history. But the one thing that Alison did know was that Mary had not died as a child.

She shifted, aware of Adam’s acute gaze resting on her. ‘She definitely survived into adulthood,’ she said.

‘I assume there is evidence to support that?’ Adam leaned against the edge of the sales desk and folded his arms. His tone was not disbelieving, but there was more than a hint of challenge in it. Alison felt a flutter down her spine. This was precisely the sort of conversation she should have avoided until she got her head together.

‘I’ve seen other portraits of Mary,’ she said. ‘I know a bit about her. I researched her for some work I was doing…’

She could sense Adam’s puzzlement. One thing he did know about her was that she was no historian. When they had met at summer school in Marlborough, she was a sullen teenager with a sponsored place on a tourism course. He had just accepted an offer to read History at Cambridge.

‘Genealogy,’ she said quickly, forestalling his next question, making it up as she went along. ‘I was looking for some stuff on my family tree and found Mary. There’s a distant connection between us.’

She felt as though she was digging herself in deeper rather than out.

‘Genealogy,’ Adam repeated. His gaze was narrowed intently on her now. He looked as though he didn’t believe a word. ‘You never talked about your family,’ he said slowly. ‘You told me you couldn’t leave them behind fast enough.’

‘That’s how I felt at eighteen,’ Alison said. ‘People change.’ She fidgeted with the strap of her bag. ‘Look, forget I mentioned Mary at all. You’ve got a talk and a book…’

‘And a TV programme,’ Adam said dryly. ‘All based on the premise that this is a portrait of Anne Boleyn not Mary Seymour.’

Alison felt a flicker of sympathy for him. The discovery of a new portrait of Anne Boleyn was quite a coup and would bring Adam lots of publicity. She had planted a seed of doubt in his mind now and even though he knew she was not a professional historian, he could not risk making a highly visible mistake.

‘It was authenticated,’ Adam said now, almost to himself. He straightened and pushed away from the desk, taking several strides across the gallery before turning back towards her, all repressed frustration and energy. ‘We found it with some other Tudor artefacts,’ he said. ‘There was no doubt about the dating. Then there was the box with the initials on it…’

‘The box still exists?’ Alison cut in quickly. ‘The one in the portrait?’

Adam stared at her. ‘Yes. Why?’

‘Oh.’ Alison moderated her tone, realising she had sounded too eager. ‘I thought there might be something interesting in it, that’s all. Something to do with Mary, I mean.’

Adam was still watching her. It was unsettling. She had always thought she was a good liar but now she was starting to doubt it.

‘There were some items inside,’ he agreed. ‘If that is indeed Mary Seymour in the portrait, I suppose they might have some connection to her.’ He did not elaborate and Alison knew it was deliberate. There was no reason why he would satisfy her curiosity.

Her heart was thumping. She could feel herself shaking. She knew she should not push this now but desperation was driving her harder than she had ever known it. Mary seemed only a breath away. And Arthur… What clues had Mary left her to Arthur?

‘Where did you find the box?’ she asked, and she could hear the quiver in her voice.

Adam shook his head. There was a faint smile playing about his lips now.

‘I’ll trade you that information – and more,’ he said, ‘to see the genealogical research you’ve done on Mary Seymour.’

There was a small, deadly pause.

Alison knew she was trapped. She could not see any way that she could show Adam the work she had done on tracing Mary without disclosing her own history. He had been right: she had not told him a single thing about her family. She had never spoken of them. But they were all there on the pages of notes she had so painstakingly compiled. The Seymour family tree linked them together, tangled as the roots of the old oaks of Savernake Forest. They were all there: she, Edward, Mary, Arthur…

The silence stretched out whilst her mind scrambled for a solution, but then Adam shifted and smiled a condescending smile that made her itch to smack him.

‘I thought not,’ he said pleasantly. ‘There is no research, is there?’ He ran a hand through his thick, fair hair. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why you’ve suddenly turned up after all this time, Alison, but there’s really no point. I moved on a long time ago—’

‘What? Wait!’ Alison drew back. ‘Are you implying I’m here because I wanted to see you? I didn’t even know about your talk!’ She threw out a hand, narrowly missing the ceramic vase. ‘I came in because of her,’ she said, pointing at Mary’s picture. ‘It was nothing to do with you—’

‘Whatever.’ Adam raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. ‘I’m not interested.’

‘Fine,’ Alison snapped. ‘Then I hope you don’t find that some other person more academically credible than I blows your Anne Boleyn theory to smithereens.’

She pushed open the door of the gallery and stepped out into the driving rain. She thought she heard Adam call after her as she slipped out into the dark but she did not wait, pulling up the hood of her jacket and hunching deeper inside it when the wind caught her with its icy edge. The disconsolate re-enactors were closing down their stalls and heading to the pub. A woman was wheeling a pushchair erratically across the pavement and was dragging a small child along with her other hand. He had toffee apple smeared across his face and was screaming.

Emotion pierced Alison deep inside where the hurt and the loneliness were locked away. She shuddered, blocking out the child’s scrunched-up face and the mother’s harassed scolding. Only fifty yards further along the wet pavement was her hotel. A small bay tree stood shivering in a planter on each side of the door. She hurried inside.

She’d chosen somewhere modern and exclusive rather than one of Marlborough’s more traditional places to stay. She’d always found that embracing the present was the best way to keep the past at bay. Except that in Marlborough tonight the past had swept back like a dark tide.

She was still shaking. She knew that rationally she could not blame Adam for thinking that she was only trying to stir up trouble, but rationality had nothing to do with the fury and frustration that welled up in her now. She felt the hot prick of angry tears against her eyelids. She had waited so long for word from Mary, each time she failed to find her, absorbing the blank wall of silence and the bitterness of defeat. And now here was Mary—and the box—and Adam was thwarting her attempts to get closer.

The winter storm was gathering, sending litter skipping along the gutters, dimming the Christmas lights with a fresh downpour of rain but, inside, the hotel was warm, opulent and lit discreetly by lamps with striped beige and cream shades. A smiling receptionist handed Alison her key. So often, Alison found light and warmth – the most basic trappings of modern life – gave her comfort and made her feel safe. Tonight, though, they only served to emphasise her sense of dislocation. So did the impersonal luxury of her room.

She dropped her soaking jacket on the floor and lay down on the bed, staring at the orange glow of the streetlights beyond the windows. She knew she did not have much choice. Adam had information she needed. He had the portrait, the box, possibly other artefacts connected to Mary. She had been waiting for five hundred years for news of her son. She could not let the chance slip now.

Chapter 2

Mary, Wiltshire, 1557

Alison Banestre and I were cousins of a kind. We were both orphans. There the bond between us began and ended: Alison, my enemy.

We made a bargain, she and I. She helped me to escape; I helped her to find her son. It is entirely possible to bargain with an enemy if there is something that you both want and so it proved. Thus we were bound together through time.

We met at Wolf Hall. I came there in the summer of fifteen hundred and fifty-seven, in the fourth year of the reign of Mary the Queen. I was a Mary, too, cousin of the late king, Edward, daughter to one dead queen and niece to another, with a famous name and not a penny to pay my way. I was ten years old and I already had a reputation for witchcraft.

‘The child is possessed, your grace,’ the cook at Grimsthorpe told the Duchess of Suffolk when, at the age of five, I was found sitting under a table in the kitchens, holding a posset that had curdled. ‘That cream was as fresh as a daisy only a moment ago.’

‘Mary broke my spinning top!’ one of my Seymour cousins wailed one day when the wooden toy was found to have split neatly into two halves like a cut pear. ‘She put a spell on it!’

That was the first time I realised that I possessed the magic. He had been tormenting me and I had hated him; the anger had boiled over within me and I had wanted nothing more than to teach him a lesson.

I did not want such power though. I wanted no more than to be ordinary, accepted. My mother, many years before, had been within inches of arrest for heresy. Witchcraft was but one strand of such blasphemy and dissent and the thought of following her fate terrified me. Yet I could not escape. It came with me to Savernake, the whisper of witchcraft, wrapped like a cloak about me, for I was different, other, an outsider, whether I wished it or not.

My name is Mary Seymour. I was born at Sudeley Castle but have no recollection of my nursery there, hung with red and gold, for almost as soon as I came into the world my mother left it. I’m told that my father had never anticipated that she might die in childbirth, which is odd since it is a common danger, particularly for a woman such as my mother Katherine Parr who was past the age when it was wise to have a first child or indeed perhaps a child at all. But she was giddy for love of him and he was giddy for love of himself so I imagine they gave little thought to the consequences of their infatuation.

I was born. My mother died. My father professed himself to be so stunned by grief that he could not think straight. However he knew enough to realise he did not want the burden of a baby daughter, so he took me to London and abandoned me in the nursery of my aunt and uncle, the Duke and Duchess of Somerset, where I might have cousins with whom to grow up. It was a good plan, if a self-interested one, and it might well have turned out quite differently had it not been for his overweening ambition, which toppled over into treason.

My earliest memory was of being unwanted.

‘What is to become of the Lady Mary?’ My governess, Mistress Aiglonby was the only one who, in the chaotic aftermath of my father’s arrest for treason, pressed for my family to continue to care for me. I can still hear the wail of her voice rising above the sound of my belongings being packed away into boxes. I had no real sense of what was happening. I remember tipping my set of skittles out of the box again, spilling them all over the floor and tripping the nursemaid up as she ran about trying to fold my clothes into a bag that was too small. She was red of face and flustered, and looked near to tears.

‘Lady Mary cannot stay here.’ It was my aunt, the duchess, who spoke. She had no warmth in her, least of all towards me.

‘I agree it would be difficult to explain to her in the future that her uncle signed her father’s death warrant.’ Dearest Liz Aiglonby. She could be tart when she chose. She had been one of my mother’s maids before she became my governess. Her family were ambitious for preferment at court but that did not prevent her from defending me like a lioness.

‘That was not my point.’ The duchess’s tone had chilled still further. ‘Let her mother’s kin take her in.’

‘The Parrs do not want her.’

No one wants her.

My skittles had been a present from my father. They were carved into the shape of men, painted to look like sailors. I took one in my fist and neatly struck off the head of another with it. Or so I am told. In truth, I probably remember nothing of this, being too young, although it feels as though the memory is real.

‘Lord Seymour suggested her grace of Suffolk…’ Mistress Aiglonby sounded hesitant now and my aunt gave a brusque bark of laughter.

‘Why would he do that? I thought he liked her?’ Her voice changed. Malice rang clear as a bell. ‘Mayhap the rumours are true and she did refuse him and this is his revenge.’

‘Her grace was a close friend of the late Queen.’

‘Which does not mean she would wish to be saddled with her penniless child.’

Yet to the Duchess of Suffolk I was sent, like an unwelcome gift, trailing my retinue of nursemaids, rockers, laundresses and servants.

Lady Suffolk was renowned for her piety but this did not mean she possessed generosity of spirit as well.

‘The late Queen’s child is too expensive for me to keep,’ she told anyone who would listen, but no one was listening, not really, not even parliament, which eventually restored to me all that was left of my father’s property. This was practically nothing. So my expensive household was dismissed but for a few servants, and Lady Suffolk sent me to her castle at Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire since I could live more cheaply in the country than in London.

I loved Grimsthorpe. The castle had been neglected since the visit of the old king Henry some ten years before and its rooms smelled of stale air and damp and secrets. There were locked doors and tumbledown walls, rambling gardens and endless woods under wide blue skies. Best of all, no one cared what I did so no one interfered. One of Liz’s brothers came to tutor me sometimes, and Liz herself tried to instil in me the skills and lessons appropriate to a lady, but I was a stubborn child and had no interest in learning. I think that the Duchess of Suffolk might have tried to betroth me young had I even the smallest dowry but as I had nothing but notoriety she knew no one would want to wed me.

How long my idyllic life at Grimsthorpe might have continued I do not know, for when I was eight years old the duchess and her fierce Protestantism fell foul of the Bishop of Winchester and she vowed to leave England for fear of persecution. There was no question that she would take me abroad with her. For a couple of years, I was shunted from pillar to post, from London to the country, from north to south, from court to church and back again. I was a nuisance. Queen Mary declared that I should be sent to one of my father’s manors. Liz Aiglonby staunchly maintained I was too young, that I was the Queen’s ward and her responsibility. Mary said dryly that as the Seymours had begat me so to the Seymours I should go.

My uncle Somerset had followed my father to the executioner’s block, so it was left to my cousin Edward, as head of the family, to provide for me. He and I were united in disgrace, the Seymours fallen further than they had ever risen.

It was then I first heard the whisper of that name:

Wolf Hall.

My first sight of the place was on a day of bright sunlight, but once we were within the forest of Savernake the sun vanished into darkness and the track seemed interminable and lonely. It felt as though we were arriving at the end of the world.

‘What sort of a name is Wolf Hall?’ Liz asked, as she placed my clothes in the big bound chest in the chamber I was to share with my cousin Alison. We had been welcomed warmly enough on arrival with bread, a little butter and some fruit although it was closer to dinner than breakfast time. Dame Margery, the housekeeper, had then shown us to my bedchamber and had vanished, although Cousin Alison had remained. She sat in the window where the pale light seemed to shimmer on her flaxen hair. I had never seen anything so pretty in my life.

Liz sounded suspicious, I thought, as though she expected a wolf to appear from behind a tree and gobble her whole. She disliked the country and thought its inhabitants unruly and unpredictable, whether human, feathered or furred. Nor did she like Wolf Hall itself. The rambling old manor was even more run down than Grimsthorpe had been and here I was less than no one and Liz, consequently, nothing at all for all her London connections and service to the court.

‘Wolf Hall is nothing to do with wolves,’ Alison said. She sounded faintly patronising. ‘It comes from the ancient Saxon name for the estate.’

‘Saxon!’ Liz said. Her family had come over with the Norman King William. Her sniff of disdain left no room for doubt that she considered the Saxons even more barbaric than the present inhabitants of Savernake Forest.

Alison smiled, tossing her golden plait over her shoulder. She looked very Saxon herself with her cream and roses complexion and her blue eyes. There was a look of the late Queen Jane about her, or so I was told. Except that Queen Jane was pious and demure and Alison was never that.

Alison and I were only distantly related, but at Wolf Hall, I had already discovered that we Seymours were all jumbled up together, called cousins regardless of our relationships, abandoned here because there was nowhere else for the sprawling offshoots of the family to go. There were half a dozen of us children and I never worked out how we were connected other than through rejection or loss. There were two babies in the nursery; whose they were I never discovered. Closest in age to me was a boy of seven, but from the lofty heights of ten years, I considered him negligible. Then there was Alison, two or three years older, and above her in the pecking order a sullen youth who boasted that he was soon to be sent away as squire in a knight’s household.

Liz had turned her back as she laid out my linen shifts in the trunk. These had been worked with fine white lace and I saw Alison’s gaze narrow on them and something cold and hard and inimical come into her pale eyes as she looked back at me. She could not have looked less like meek Queen Jane then.

‘Those are very beautiful linens indeed,’ she said.

‘The Lady Mary is dressed as befits the daughter of a queen,’ Liz said.

Alison’s cornflower gaze swept over me. ‘Only beneath her gown,’ she said.

Even though I was only ten years old I was adept at reading what went on in the minds of men—and women—for my fate had often depended upon it. I knew that Alison resented me; that for all my notoriety and poverty, she was jealous because I had fame even though it was not of my own seeking. I was also adept at smoothing over discord so I slid from my chair and went over to her.

‘Would you show me the forest?’ I asked.

She looked scornful. ‘It would take days for you to see the forest.’ Her sharp gaze pinned me down. ‘We are forbidden from venturing there. It is dangerous.’

‘Why?’

There was a sudden silence and I realised that she did not know. She had never asked.

‘It just is.’ Her head was bent. I could not see her expression. Her busy fingers were sorting through the skeins of thread in her workbox. She put aside the ones that drew my gaze—the red, the gold, the blue—and selected the brown and the black. ‘Besides we have no time for idleness here. We clean and cook and sew and tend the garden and dairy and a thousand other things beside.’

‘Are there not servants to do such tasks?’

She gave a snort of laughter. ‘So speaks the Queen’s daughter. No, your highness—’ her mouth curved into a sly little smile ‘—we do not have that luxury here, at least not when Sir Edward is away. In his absence we make shift for ourselves.’

I bit my tongue before I could make reference to Cousin Edward. Already she found me presumptuous. I would do nothing to antagonise her further. Instead, I slipped out of the bedroom when Liz’s back was turned. I knew Alison would tell her she had no notion of where I had gone and if I got lost in the dangerous forest she would not mourn me.

I had not been at Wolf Hall long enough to know which chamber was which, but I ignored the blank doors staring at me and trod softly down the stair. Patterns of light and shade speckled the steps. The wood creaked beneath my feet and I hesitated, but no one came. I was accustomed to sliding away on my own, gone like a ghost. Although I had been hedged about by servants from the earliest age, I still managed to be a solitary child.

To my left was the Great Hall with its sloping stone floor, swept clean this afternoon and smelling sweetly of rushes. Behind me the chapel door, heavy studded oak, forbidding, warning of retribution within. But ahead was the passage and, at the end of it, the door was open into the garden and I was drawn irresistibly outside.

The gardens at Wolf Hall proved a delight, a tangled land of enchantment full of overblown roses and secret paths. Beneath the trees of the orchard I could see a harassed-looking goose girl trying to round up her flock. She was flapping as much as they. Over in the stable yard, I could hear the chink of harness and the murmur of voices. The air was full of scent and heat, and I wandered at will, lost in the pleasure of it.

The garden led to the wood. There was a half-open gate covered in ivy and a path beyond. Naturally, I followed it. I say naturally because I am drawn to the forest. I don’t know why; people say it is a lonely, lawless place, but to me it is a safe haven in which to hide. One path led to another and another, some overgrown tracks, other wide avenues lined by trees that looked like the entrance to a manor far more majestic than Wolf Hall. I went where I willed, following a butterfly here or the sound of water there, running through the dappled shade, discovering new delights.

It was growing dark. I realised it suddenly, knew I had been out for a long time because I was hungry. There was a damp chill settling on my skin. The trees that had enchanted me now threw long shadows. The rustle of the leaves sounded too loud. The air felt still and watchful.

I had no notion which way was the road back.

Distantly, I heard the sound of hoof beats. My hopes lifted, for where there was a horse and rider there might well be a track leading to Wolf Hall. I scrambled through the undergrowth, pushing aside bracken and nettle and grasses, fighting my way towards the noise. With each step the night seemed to close in. The hoof beats were growing louder and, as I stumbled out of the clutch of the thicket and onto a wide avenue, they seemed to fill my head and make my entire body pulse. The earth shook. I fell, dizzy and sprawling, and lay there in terror, waiting either for the shout of fury from the rider or the crush of the horse’s hooves.

Neither came.

The beat in my head eased a little and I dragged myself up onto one elbow and stared into the engulfing shade. Down the long avenue, I could see the white shadow of a horse galloping hell for leather. In the saddle swayed the figure of a woman. She looked as though she were about to fall at any moment. Her cloak billowed out behind her, a fine velvet cloak laced with silver thread, and on her head… But she wore no hat and she had no face because above the line of her collar she had no head, nothing but white bone gleaming in the last light and deep red splashes of blood.

*

There was a jumble of light and voices about me. I was not lost in the forest but lying in a bed. The tip of a feather pricked my cheek and I turned my head against the pillow. There was candlelight. It was night, and I felt hot and sickly and wretched.

‘Already nothing but trouble…’ The lamentation floated far above my head. I recognised Dame Margery’s voice. ‘Only here for two minutes and already we have had to send out a search for her, and pay for a physician—’

‘Pass me the bowl and the cloth.’ Liz this time, sounding snappish. ‘You heard what he said. She has the fever.’

‘She has only herself to blame, wandering around the forest alone! She’s like her father was, reckless and foolish. She does not think about the consequences of her actions.’

‘She is a child who got lost, that is all.’ Liz was starting to sound frayed. I thought it unlikely she would defend my father, whom she had never liked. It was my mother to whom she had been devoted.

‘Babbling about phantom horses and headless women!’ Dame Margery was not so easily appeased. ‘It sounds like witchcraft to me.’

‘It’s fever, no more,’ Liz repeated. I heard the rustle of cloth as she stood. ‘I need fresh water.’

‘I’ll come with you.’ Dame Margery sounded hurried now, as though she did not wish to be left alone with me for fear of enchantment. ‘Alison can watch over her for a moment.’

I had not realised that Alison was there. I opened my eyes a crack. She saw the flicker of movement and immediately she was at my ear.

‘I hope you are satisfied, your highness.’ She smelled of peppermint and sweat. Her whisper was fierce. ‘Thanks to you, I have to share a chamber with the babies now whilst you lord it in here alone. I wish they had not found you!’ Her face hung over me like a big red angry moon.

‘It’s true, there are phantoms in the forest,’ she said. ‘I think it was the black shuck you saw, a huge dog that brings death and madness to all that see it.’

‘It was a horse.’ My lips were dry. I felt hot, feverish, and my head was full of the nightmare but I was still stubborn. If I were to be terrorised by a phantom at least let it be the right one.

‘A horse and a dead woman?’ She laughed. ‘Mayhap is was Queen Anne Boleyn you saw then. If it had not been for your Aunt Jane she would not have lost her head. Maybe she is coming for you in revenge.’

The sound of voices and the lifting of the latch warned her. She scrambled away and when Liz and Dame Margery re-entered the room she was sitting on the window seat all prim and quiet.

‘She sleeps,’ she said sweetly. ‘May I go now?’ And with that she slipped from the room leaving me with my feverish nightmares.

*

Darrell came to me that night as I was tossing and turning in my sleep. Darrell had been my companion, from the earliest time. He was more than a daydream or an imaginary friend. I knew from the start that he was as real as I; that we could talk to each other in images and thoughts and ideas. Such things are natural to children. We do not question. I did not know who he was. I assumed we must be related in some way, such gifts so often connecting members of one family, but I had so many relatives and when I looked around at the sprawling network of my Seymour cousins not one of them felt right. He told me his name was Darrell and even though he knew I was called Mary he called me Cat because he said I was small and fierce. I loved him; it was simple and comfortable because I had always known him. He felt almost like another aspect of myself, closer than close

‘Cat. Are you there?’

The words came to me, as they had always done, as a whisper sliding into my mind, calling me. From earliest childhood it had happened like this, first in blocks of colours and images in my mind and then, as I grew older, in words and emotions.

‘Where are you?’

I ignored him, turning a shoulder as though he was in the room and I was shunning him. When I had been obliged to leave Grimsthorpe, I had called to him for comfort but he had not replied. I had been hurt, needing him and the comfort his presence brought. Yet sometimes it had been like this. He slipped back and forth through my life and sometimes when I needed him, he was gone. This was the first time he had spoken to me since I had left Lincolnshire and it was contrary of me to sulk when he was the one person who could make me feel better.

‘Cat?’

‘I am at Wolf Hall.’ I was short with him.

I felt his puzzlement before it cleared like rain clouds running from the sun.

‘Savernake? Why?’

‘They sent me away again.’ I was sick and feeling sorry for myself. I felt him laugh. Unforgivable.

‘Poor Cat.’

I sent him the mental equivalent of a rude gesture I’d seen the servants make and felt him laughing harder.

‘Such a lady.’

‘Go away.’

He sobered at once, sensing the genuine misery beneath my ill temper.

‘I’m sorry. Is it very bad?’

This time I sent a shrug, a hardy sort of a feeling. It was bravado. He knew I was homesick and lonely and unhappy. He could sense it. I could not keep him out even when I wanted to do so. Yet I also knew that not so many years before he too had been sent from home. I had sensed his loneliness and isolation. I had tried to get him to tell me about it—had he gone to another household for his education? It was the way life ran for the sons of noble households and sometimes the daughters too. He would tell me nothing about himself, though, not then, not ever. He was a mystery to me.

‘There’s the forest to explore. You love the forest.’

The thought felt eager and so like a boy, trying to offer solutions. If only he knew how much the forest had cost me already. Nevertheless, I had softened towards him. I could not help myself. He always made me feel better. There was comfort in his presence and I no longer felt so alone.

‘Yes. I suppose so.’

He sent me a boy’s hug, clumsy, affectionate. I smiled. The warmth of it soothed me, lulling me back into sleep.

‘Goodnight, Darrell.’

‘Goodnight, Cat.’ Goodnight, goodnight…

I slept.

Chapter 3

As soon as my fever had gone, Alison came back like nettle rash, irritating, never leaving me in peace. Of course I would not be ten years old for ever and Alison and I would not always be at daggers drawn, but just then it felt as though we would. For a little while we rattled around together like two cats trapped in a box, hissing, scratching each other, fighting on occasion, but over time we learned to live with each other. We kept a wary distance although life at Wolf Hall did not make it easy to avoid her.

We were up at five, whether it was summer or winter. In the summer this was no hardship for dawn had crept into the room long before, but in winter I clung to the warmth of my bed for as long as I could. Naturally, Alison called me lazy. In order to eat we had to work, and the work started early. There was milk to be churned, pottage to be boiled, flax to be spun and carded, rushes to be peeled to make lights and rooms to be swept clean. I preferred working in the kitchen in the winter. At least there was a fire, whereas the damp chill of the forest crept like a ghost through the cracks and crannies of the old house. There was no idle chatter to accompany our work. This might be a nobleman’s household, but whilst my cousin Edward Seymour lived the life of a courtier in London, we followed the older rules of life in the country.

I was lucky. I had time given to learning: languages, reading and needlework. So did Alison. The idea, I imagine, was that we should be settled creditably in marriage when the time came. Alison had no interest in book learning and neither did I really, but there were two things that kept me at my studies. The first was the knowledge that my mother had been a well-educated woman and I felt in some obscure way that I would be letting her down if I were to abandon my lessons. The second was more practical. I knew that time spent in study was time not spent washing, cleaning and pickling fruit, which I liked even less than book learning.

Going to the market in Marlborough was our treat. It was not permitted often, which made it all the more exciting. We had no need for the eggs, butter and cheese on sale there since we made our own, but Dame Margery would purchase meat and fish to augment our stocks and we would browse the stalls selling leather purses and belts, nails, knives, dead pigeons and coneys.

The day would start with the long cart ride into town, jolting over the rutted forest tracks. Dickon escorted us. He had fought alongside the late Sir John Seymour, Edward’s grandfather, many years ago. On bad days, when his bones pained him, he would grumble that all he was fit for now was acting as nursemaid to a parcel of women. On good days, when the sun shone and the birds sang, he would whistle tunelessly as he rode beside us.

I loved the market for the noise and colour, the gossip and drinking, the smells and the sense of a bigger world beyond the brick walls of Wolf Hall. It mattered not to me that the cobbles of Marlborough ran with blood from the carcasses that hung on the pegs on the stalls, or that the sweet sickly smell of them mingled with the scent of ale and burning until Alison pressed her pomander to her nose and threatened to retch. When Dame Margery took her eyes off us I would slip away between the booths. The shouts and calls of the traders crashed like waves above my head as I wriggled between chickens in their cages.

‘Good day, Lady Mary.’ It was the barber surgeon, pausing in the removal of a tooth to greet me.

‘Hold still,’ he instructed the groaning man in the chair. ‘Take some more spirit to dull the ache.’

The scent of cloves, the heat of a fire, the man screaming in pain: that was the world of Marlborough market as I remembered it. After a few hours, Dame Margery would round us up like sheep and take us back to the cart, where Dickon lounged with a flagon of ale, and we would jolt our way home. Dame Margery would be mellow and smell of meat pasties. I would doze as she regaled Alison with the gossip from the town.

One trip was different though. It was a hot summer day, too drowsy to do much except sleep. None of us wanted to exchange the cool shadows of the forest and the scented gardens of Wolf Hall for the rotting smells and flyblown stalls of the market. Dame Margery insisted, however. She was in a bad mood and was determined the rest of us would be unhappy too and so we took to the rutted roads, the journey almost shaking the cart apart, and arrived in town in the blazing heat of midday.

It was curiously quiet. There was no business for the barber surgeon, no business for anyone save the stalls selling ale. Dame Margery and Alison disappeared off to buy some gold and silver thread to embroider a shirt for Cousin Edward. He was due to visit Wolf Hall soon, a rare occurrence, and there was much excitement at the prospect. I wandered listlessly between the stalls where the vendors did not even trouble to glance my way. Some snored in the sun, others were drinking, everything was muted and still, and over the top of it all was the smell of the dung and the meat and the rot, strong enough to make my head spin.

I stumbled out of the crush of stalls and found myself a few paces down from the White Hart Inn. And there was Alison, poised in the tavern doorway, looking as though she were about to run inside. She was clad in a cloak of orange tawny, and her fair hair was dark with rain and I realised that I could feel the water on my face too. I was soaked to the skin and shivering, and the sky was dark grey and the wind was cold. I called her name and then I felt a touch on my arm. Her face swam into focus; she was shaking me.

‘Hush! What is the matter with you? You sound crazed!’

The sun was burning hot and the sweat was running down my face, splashing on my gown. I blinked it out of my eyes. There was no orange cloak and no rain. People were staring. Alison looked furious.

‘I swear you are a simpleton, Mary Seymour,’ she hissed, dragging me away, towards the cart.

‘I saw you,’ I said. ‘At the inn. In an orange cloak.’

‘She is taking another of her fevers.’ Dame Margery was on my other side and between them they half lifted, half pushed me up so that I rolled across the floor of the cart like an ungainly barrel. ‘Either that or she is bewitched.’

She made the sign of the cross.

‘More likely she is a fool than a witch,’ Alison said, but she was looking at me very thoughtfully indeed.

*

‘Darrell.’

I reached out to him that night, tired, lost and lonely, but there was no response. I knew he always came back. But I needed him now and I sent the thoughts out through the dark, but received nothing back but a faint, lost echo.

*

I was in my twelfth summer when Alison started to disappear. One night I woke to discover that she was missing. Assuming that she had merely gone to the privy, I rolled over and fell asleep almost immediately. It happened again a few days later, and then again, and this time I forced myself to stay awake to see how long she was gone. I lost track of time; the moonlight crept across the ceiling, the floorboards creaked and settled, the mice scratched and I fell asleep waiting. In the morning Alison was asleep in bed beside me and made no reference to her absence the night before.

How long we might have gone on in this vein, I do not know, for Alison never explained herself and I never asked. I was not even sure she knew that I knew. One night, though, about a month in, the pretence unravelled. My curiosity had got the better of sleep at last and when I heard the sound of murmured voices outside I slipped out of bed and tiptoed across to the window.

It was high summer and the casement was wide, letting in soft air and starlight. Down on the terrace I could see two shadows merging. I heard a sigh, and laughter, quickly hushed. One figure broke away then and the other disappeared into the darkness of the garden. A door closed softly below; the dogs did not bark. I made a dash for the bed, bumping into the table and knocking the china jug to the floor in the process. It fell with a clatter that broke like thunder through the quiet house and rolled across the floorboards to smash against the wall. The dogs began barking then.

The chamber door flew open. Alison stood there, fear in her eyes. She cast a hunted look over her shoulder for behind her there was a babble of voices and the sound of footsteps. She was about to be discovered.

‘Quick!’ I hissed. ‘Into the bed!’

She leaped fully clothed and shod under the covers and pulled them up to her chin. When Dame Margery appeared, candle in hand, grey braids trailing, Alison was doing a creditable imitation of someone who had just been woken from sleep.

‘What in the name of all that is holy is going on here?’ Dame Margery looked like a terrier, brindled and growling.

I dropped a submissive curtsey. ‘Your pardon, Dame Margery. I knocked over the jug on my way back from the privy.’

Dame Margery looked suspiciously from the pieces of broken china in my hand to the dark corners of the room, as though she expected to see some devil lurking. Again I saw her making the sign of the cross in my direction, a hasty and furtive guard against witchcraft.

I bit my tongue hard. I was no witch; I did not choose my gift and wanted none of it. It scared and angered me that she labelled me so. But my position at Wolf Hall was precarious beneath the veneer of my fame and status. I could not afford to anger Dame Margery.

‘You may tidy it in the morning.’ She was brusque with me. ‘Back to bed now, and try not to cause any more trouble.’

The door closed. The light was doused. I climbed back into bed.

‘Why did you do that?’ Alison’s hissed whisper reached me out of the dark. ‘Why did you help me?’ She sounded annoyed rather than grateful.

I decided to take it literally. ‘If I had not you would have been found out.’

She was silent for a moment. I had not answered her question and I could feel her puzzlement.

‘Don’t tell anyone or you’ll be sorry,’ she threatened.

I turned a shoulder and drew the covers up over me. I had already proved that I would not tell. There was no need for further words.

I heard her slipping off her shoes and the rustle of clothes before the mattress shifted and she lay back down. A few minutes passed.

‘Did you see him?’ she asked suddenly.

‘No,’ I said.

She gave a sigh and a little wriggle. ‘He’s lovely.’ Her voice had softened. ‘Oh, Mary, he is so handsome! I love him.’ She rolled over so that she was facing me. ‘Shall I tell you about him? Abut what it is like when I am with him?’ Her voice was eager. I knew she wanted to talk but I did not want to hear it.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Tell me nothing. That way I can’t be made to tell anyone else.’

There was silence. I could feel her withdrawing from me. It had been our one chance of friendship and I had rejected it. She said nothing else but I felt her coldness.

Despite that, she was all glowing and bright through those hot summer nights, slipping off to meet her lover more blatantly now that she knew I knew and would say nothing. In the daytime she was dreamy and softer than she had ever been, almost kind. She looked buxom and ripe and she seemed always on the point of bursting into flower. I saw the way that the men looked at her and she saw it too and liked it. I was twelve years old, skinny and small and quiet. No one looked at me and I made sure it stayed that way. Not for me midnight trysts in the garden or a tumble behind the orchard wall. I thought Alison foolish beyond measure.

Disaster came to her very quickly. One day I was called away from my duties in the stillroom and into the parlour. The page was voluble and excited, the courtyard swarming with men and horses.

‘Sir Edward is here!’ He told me as I followed him, wiping my hands on my apron in a hasty attempt to rub off the smell of oil. ‘He wants to see you at once.’

As the parlour door swung shut behind me, I saw that there were four people in the room. Dame Margery was there, her long face sunk into grim lines I had not seen before. Beside her sat Liz Aiglonby. I looked to Liz for clues but for once her expression gave me nothing.

The two men were unknown to me. The elder was large, careless in his dress, with a high complexion and, I judged, a short temper. Already he was tapping his fingers impatiently. I did not care for the look of him.

The other was indeed my cousin Edward Seymour. Throughout my time at Wolf Hall, Edward had been an elusive presence, often rumoured to be about to visit us, but never appearing. Our house of misfits and orphans had been beneath his notice. But now he was here.

My cousin Edward had gloss. He had been brought up with the boy King Edward, our cousin, and it showed. He was only a young man but confidence cloaked him. He was handsome too and, as I entered the room, he stood and he took my hand and kissed it, courtly fashion.

‘Lady Mary. Cousin. I am happy to meet you.’

I could have pointed out to him that he appeared to have been in no great hurry to do so but I did not, bobbing a curtsey, which gained a nod of approval from Liz.

‘Sit. Please.’ He led me to a chair that was placed directly before the circle of inquisitors. ‘Dame Margery and Mistress Aiglonby are known to you, of course.’ His smile was charming. ‘This is our uncle Sir Henry Seymour.’

‘Lady Mary.’ Sir Henry inclined his head with a wintry smile. I could tell at once that he thought me of no account, being a woman and a plain one at that, but because of my name and our kinship he was prepared to show courtesy at least. There were men who said that Henry Seymour lacked the ambition of his brothers, my late father and uncle, but since they had lost their heads for it whilst he had garnered lands and offices, he was self-evidently the wisest of the three. He was certainly too grand and too important to have visited Wolf Hall during my time there. Now I felt his shrewd gaze assessing me.

‘An ill-favoured maid to be the child of so handsome a man and so gracious a lady,’ he said now.

I saw Liz poker up with outrage but I felt nothing but amusement. Nothing could please me more than to be considered undistinguished. Notoriety had served my parents ill. Invisibility would suit me best.

‘Mary will grow to be a beauty,’ Liz said stoutly, although she sounded less than certain.

I settled myself in the chair, folding my hands demurely in my lap. Dame Margery’s frown deepened; she knew my docility was assumed and it was another reason she disliked me. She thought me sly when I was simply careful.

‘Lady Mary.’ My cousin Edward sat forward, pleasantries over. ‘You share a bedchamber with Mistress Banestre?’

I nodded. His gaze grew sharper. ‘Does she ever bring anyone else to your chamber?’

‘A man,’ Sir Henry snapped. ‘Has she brought men into her bed?’

I saw Edward shoot him a look of irritation. ‘Gently, sir. Mary is but a little maid—’

‘No,’ I said bluntly, interrupting, ‘she has not.’

‘Have you ever seen her with a man?’ Edward asked.

I thought of the night when I had seen Alison and her lover kissing on the terrace. I had seen nothing but shadows, no man.

‘No,’ I said.

Liz sat back, the tension in her shoulders slackening. ‘See?’ she said. It was directed more at Dame Margery than the men. ‘She knows nothing of it.’

‘Does Mistress Banestre ever slip out at night?’ Sir Henry demanded. His colour was vivid now, like spilt red wine. He was drumming the fingers of one hand on his knee.

I hesitated.

‘She does!’ Sir Henry said triumphantly. ‘I knew it!’

‘Since she is four months gone with child,’ Edward said with exasperation, ‘we all know she must have done.’

Liz was watching me and saw the shock reflected in my eyes. ‘You did not know, did you, Mary?’ she said gently. ‘You did not know that Alison was enceinte?’

‘No,’ I said for a third time. I hesitated again. I knew little of pregnancy and childbirth but I was not completely ignorant. I had grown up in the country. I had seen farm animals mating and knew that people did it too. I had also been with the others to the Midsummer Fair, where maids and men would slip away with much giggling and touching and disappear into the bushes together.

‘Has she been sick of a morning?’ Dame Margery asked sharply.

‘No,’ I said, once again. ‘Not that I am aware.’

Dame Margery gave a snort of disgust. ‘It seems you have seen and heard nothing! All manner of things might have occurred but you would be in ignorance of them.’

‘Which is precisely as it should be,’ Liz said sharply.

‘Has Mistress Banestre told you the name of her lover?’ Edward picked up the questioning again. ‘Has she mentioned any man’s name to you?’

I realised then that Alison must have refused to disclose the name of the child’s father to them. She had told me that he was handsome, and that she was in love with him, but she had never told me his name.

‘No,’ I said.

‘You are a woman of few words, Cousin,’ Edward teased me. ‘Or perhaps you are a loyal friend.’

‘Alison and Mary are not friends,’ Dame Margery said, as though it gave her pleasure.

‘Then she knows nothing,’ Liz said. ‘If it please you, sir—’ she glanced at Edward ‘—she should be allowed to go.’

Edward nodded. ‘I will see you at dinner, Coz,’ he said. ‘We have much to talk about.’

But it was apparent that both he and Sir Henry were far too busy and important to stay to dinner for less than an hour later they were gone in a spatter of summer dust and clatter of hooves, their entourage with them, and silence settled on Wolf Hall once more.

I found Alison up in our chamber, dragging clothes from a chest and throwing them furiously into a smaller travelling box. She did not look so radiant now. Her face was puffy and tearstained.

‘They’re sending me away,’ she said briefly, answering my unspoken question. ‘I have to go to my aunt in Kent until after the baby is born.’

‘I didn’t know you had an aunt in Kent,’ I said.

‘I don’t.’ She shrugged. ‘I made her up. I was damned if they were going to tell me what to do. I’ll go where I please.’

It sounded like bravado to me but I held my tongue. Alison in this mood was brittle and dangerous. I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched her take out her anger and frustration on her smocks and petticoats. ‘That disgusting old man—’ One of the smocks ripped in her busy hands. ‘Sir Henry. He wanted to beat the name of my baby’s father from me. He said I would scream it soon enough if they stripped me and whipped my back.’

I winced. I had sensed that streak of prurient cruelty in Sir Henry.

‘Why will you not tell them?’ I asked.

For a brief second she looked utterly desolate. ‘I cannot. You don’t understand. He…’ She hesitated. ‘I promised him I would not.’

‘Is he already wed?’ I asked. It seemed the only reasonable explanation otherwise Cousin Edward would surely find the man and oblige him to marry Alison.

‘No, he is not,’ she said.

‘Then…’ I waited. What barrier could there be then to marriage? It did not make sense to me. What sort of man, for that matter, would take his pleasure and then abandon Alison to the consequence?

‘He is a great man.’ She spoke in a rush. ‘A lord. He cannot marry me. I am not—’ She stopped but it was as though she had said the words aloud.

I am not good enough.

Her defiance returned: ‘It is no matter. I can manage on my own.’

I said nothing. Could she? Alison was clever but she was a gently bred girl. It seemed unthinkable that she could survive alone. However, I had learned not to voice such opinions. They never seemed to find favour even if they were often true.

Alison finished packing the box and slammed down the lid, drawing the buckles on the straps tight. Then she stood looking at me a shade awkwardly.

‘I don’t know if I’ll see you again,’ she said.

‘No,’ I agreed.

She frowned. ‘You’re a strange one, Mary Seymour,’ she blurted out. ‘Do you care for no one and nobody?’

I was taken aback. I’d never really thought about it. I cared for Liz. She had always been a part of my life and it felt impossible not to love her. I cared for Darrell too, with a sweet sharp pang of possessive pride because he was my secret. Yet beyond that I formed no real friendships and made no ties. Because I was rootless somehow I had understood instinctively that it was safer to remain so against the time when everything would change again.

‘I’ll miss you,’ I said, not sure if it was true but needing to find something to appease her.

She looked scornful. ‘Like a thorn in the side.’

‘Even so,’ I said.

‘Liar,’ she said. All the same, she almost smiled. There was a moment when I thought she might even hug me but in the end she did not.

‘Goodbye, then, Mary Seymour,’ she said, and she walked out of the room without a backward glance.

That night I lay alone in the bed I had shared with her. It felt strange. I did miss her.

I lay awake staring at the ceiling, the cracked plaster and the moving shadows. I wondered about Darrell. I had always thought he must be a cousin of mine, sharing the same gift as I, inherited in some distant past. I wondered if he could be Cousin Edward. It seemed impossible though; that distant, glittering figure, too fine for all of us at Wolf Hall, could surely not be my mysterious companion and friend.

Tentatively I whispered his name and felt the familiar pattern come through in return, the warmth, the love, the friendship.

‘Are you Edward Seymour?’ I asked.

I felt his laughter but he did not answer me.

Chapter 4

Alison, 1559

‘Where to, mistress?’ the carter asked.

They were bumping along the rutted track through the forest in the company of turnips and with the stench of manure. Alison drew her cloak closer about her face but it could not block out the smell, only make the world darker.

‘Anywhere,’ she said, ‘as long as it is away from here.’

She hated the forest. She hated Savernake. She hated Wolf Hall. Most of all she hated Edward Seymour with his lies and his hypocrisy.

‘I will always love you,’ he had told her. ‘I will never forsake you.’

What sort of fool was she to be so taken in?

‘Bastard,’ she said aloud, but the words had a desolate edge. She had been taken in because she had allowed herself to be. She had dreamed a dream of marriage and restoration to her place in the world. She had loved. She had hoped.

She saw the carter casting a look at her over his shoulder before he coaxed to horse from walk to amble.

Careful.

He would talk, in his cups, about the pregnant wench from Wolf Hall who had been sent away in disgrace. Likely he knew of her already. She had to follow the plan proscribed for her or word might get back to Edward. Not that he would care. She was off his hands now. The entire Seymour family were good at picking up and discarding their relatives as it suited them.

‘Marlborough,’ she said, with a sigh.

‘The castle?’

‘The White Hart.’

The tavern was the place where the coach sent by her aunt was supposed to be waiting to convey her to Kent. There was no coach, of course, just as there was no aunt, but it had pleased her to pretend to Edward that she did not need his help. He had given her guilt money, enough for the journey and more. She could survive on her own. She had done so after both her parents had died of the pox and her brother and sister with them. Both the manor and the village of Hartmere had been decimated. It had been weeks and weeks before anyone had ventured to look for survivors and found her, foraging for food whilst her family rotted upstairs in the fetid heat of summer. She had been six years old.

Now she was sixteen but the emotions were the same; the fear so great she could only look at it out of the corner of her eye in case it would swallow her whole; the determination that the fear would not win no matter how monstrous. Now she had something else to survive for too: the babe growing inside her. She had to be strong for her child.

At first she had thought she might get work making lace, or pins. There was plenty of industry in Marlborough, though most of it was too crude for her, the tanning of hides and the spinning of coarse cloth. But she had a talent for embroidery and sewing and she had been well taught. Then she had realised that it was too dangerous; someone would see her. Edward would hear of it. But the world was a big place and she should have bigger ambitions. There was Salisbury, or Bath, or London, where she could lose herself amongst the thousands of others. London appealed to her; she had heard that a man—or a woman—could make a fortune in that febrile, exciting society that felt so different from anything she knew.

She would be able to keep the child if she was brave and followed her plan. Her hand strayed to her swollen belly. She had tried to hate the baby for ruining everything but to her surprise she had failed. Accustomed to thinking herself cold, she had found nothing but maternal warmth towards the unwanted child. It was hers and she loved it fiercely. If she were honest with herself, and she had no wish to be, she had loved its father as well. Loving him had been a mistake but perhaps she was not as strong as she liked to imagine herself. That, however, was no way to think when she was facing the future alone.

She thought of Mary then. Mary was lucky and the thought turned Alison’s stomach sour as it always did. Mary might be an orphan, but her status as the late Queen Katherine’s daughter would protect her for as long as there were people to remember it. Even if they did not care, the Seymours had to be seen to do right by her. They would provide her with a dowry, or the Queen would grant her an estate, or perhaps two. Alison closed her eyes and rested her head against the hard wood of the side of the cart. The Seymours might once have provided her with a modest dowry to encourage some rustic squire to take her to wife, but not now. She told herself she was glad and swallowed the bubbles of unhappiness that rose in her throat.

The cart crossed the river by the stone bridge, turned right into the high street and rolled past the town cross, weaving across the street to avoid a pile of brushwood stacked haphazardly in front of a house. Craning her neck, Alison could see the mound, with its tumbledown castle atop, cutting the skyline to the west. The castle belonged to Edward, too, but since his father’s fall from grace he did not have the funds to restore it and it had been slowly decaying for at least a hundred years. It was said that the mound beneath contained the body of the wizard Merlin, which Alison thought was a ridiculous idea. People were very credulous. Never had she believed in magic. Dame Margery babbled about witchcraft because she was frightened, of life, of those matters she could not explain. Alison had always considered life to be mundane and without any sort of enchantment except perhaps of the sort she had briefly found in her lover’s arms.

This was the end of the town where the tannery was situated and Alison drew a fold of her cloak across her face, trying in vain to blot out the smell of dung and urine and blood. Her stomach lurched with sickness. She had eaten nothing and so there was nothing to bring up; a blessing perhaps.

‘We are at the White Hart, mistress.’

The cart had stopped. The horse waited patiently, the carter less so. He had errands to run. He did not offer to help her down and when she jumped it was awkwardly, hampered by her pregnancy and the full skirts. She gave him a penny and no thanks.

There was no waiting coach in the inn yard. For all his haste, Alison could feel the carter pausing to watch her so she walked nonchalantly under the arch of the gatehouse and through the open door into the hall. It was dark enough to make her stumble after the light outside and the smoke from the open fire caught in her throat. A woman was standing by the hearth, stirring one of the pots that were hanging over the flames on an iron frame. A wooden hourglass stood on the table to the right of the fire. The sand in it had almost run through.

The woman glanced up as Alison came in. ‘There’s no work here. Not for the likes of you.’ Quick to judgement. Her gaze flickered over Alison’s stomach making her meaning explicitly clear. Like the carter, she knew. She had heard about the Seymour cousin, who was no more than a trollop.

‘I am waiting for a coach to London,’ Alison said haughtily. ‘I will sit if I may.’

The woman tossed her head. ‘Sit if you want.’

Go to hell if you want, Alison thought.

She woman offered no refreshment.

The bench was of wood but made slippery by the cushions balanced on its narrow surface. Alison sat gingerly. What now? She was waiting for a coach that would never come and, judging by the sly look in the landlady’s eye, the woman knew it.

A sudden clatter from the yard outside, the sound of voices in some imaginative curses, the splintering of wood made the woman exclaim and sent her hurrying out of the door towards the buttery, wiping her hands on her stained apron as she went. Quick as a flash, Alison slid off the bench and hurried over to the pot. Beef stew; it smelled good now that the nausea had subsided. She tried a spoonful, then another. Too hot, it scalded her mouth.

There was the sound of a latch lifting across the other side of the hall.

Caught.

She turned. The wind blew the smoke sideways, setting it swirling in the draught flowing between the two open doors. For a moment, Alison was blinded by it, eyes stinging, head aching. The world jolted as though she had missed a step in a flight of stairs and tripped over an unseen obstacle lurking in the dark below. She moved instinctively towards the door, seeking light and air and clarity.

The darkness cleared, the smoke disappeared. She was out in the street, but it was a different street in a different place completely. The sunlight was bright enough to make her shade her eyes. The air was full of noises. They assaulted her; shouts, crashing sounds, a roaring she could not begin to identify. Everything was shockingly intense, frighteningly loud and utterly unfamiliar, spiralling outwards into a spinning top of sensation. Her knees sagged. Her heart pounded.

‘Are you all right, love?’ A woman with a broad West Country accent had stopped in front of her. She was wearing very few clothes, legs and arms exposed, brown as a nut and wrinkled. It was disgusting.

‘You should take it easy,’ the woman said. ‘You can’t go rushing about in the hot sun when you’re pregnant, not in fancy dress like that.’ She pushed something into Alison’s hand, a bottle, made of a clear substance, not glass but something lighter.

‘Drink it,’ the woman said. Then, impatiently, meeting Alison’s blank gaze. ‘It’s only water, for God’s sake. I’m not trying to poison you.’

‘I…’ Alison did not know what she was trying to say but the sound was lost in a roar of noise as some sort of vehicle drove past. Beyond it Alison saw the façade of a house that looked familiar with its jetties and steep gabled roof. Familiar and yet different; the distortion was like looking through a glass window at something she knew and yet no longer recognised.

Alison dropped the bottle on the stone at her feet. It bounced. She turned and ran, back through the door of what had been the tavern. Immediately, the sound died, shut off, the silence so loud it hurt her ears. The landlady was stirring the pot over the hearth. The smoke still stung her eyes.

‘There you are,’ the woman said. ‘There’s a man in the yard outside asking for you. Seymour livery.’ There was a grudging respect in her tone now.

Alison sank down onto the cushioned bench and raised a hand to her head. She could feel the sweat, sticky and hot, at the roots of her hair. She had no idea what had happened to her; whether she was mad, possessed, or sick. Perhaps those fools who believed in enchantments were not such fools after all. She had seen… What precisely had she seen? She had no notion.

‘Mistress Banestre?’

Edward’s squire did not look best pleased to have been obliged to come looking for her. He was a dark, surly fellow with a sly expression in his eyes. Alison had seen him before. Edward used him to arrange his amours.

‘She’s sick,’ the landlady said, sounding pleased and important. ‘It’s too hot for someone in her condition to be travelling.’

The man’s gaze flicked over Alison carelessly. It told her that he had seen plenty of light women come and go and her condition was by no means unusual.

‘She’ll manage,’ he said, ‘if she wants to please Sir Edward.’

‘I was not expecting you,’ Alison said coldly. ‘Sir Edward did not mention sending a carriage.’

The man smirked. ‘Aren’t you a lucky girl, then? Sir Edward’s changed his mind. He’s not done with you yet.’

He put a hand beneath her elbow, levering her to her feet, steering her towards the stable yard. His grip felt like a manacle on her arm. Suddenly Alison was desperate to escape. She could not give herself to Edward again when he treated her with such contempt.

She threw a glance over her shoulder towards the other door, the one out into the street. What future lay behind that one in a place so foreign and strange? The servant had her in a tight grip, half dragging, half lifting her towards the carriage and, suddenly, now that it was too late, Alison wished she had found out. She struggled but the man only laughed. And then the door slammed and the darkness closed about her.

Mary, 1560

I missed Alison. It surprised me. I was growing up and the gulf between the younger children and me seemed accentuated by her departure. Wolf Hall was quiet. No new waifs and strays came to take Alison’s place. My lessons with the chaplain and with Liz Aiglonby continued and, in between, I avoided Dame Margery and spent any spare moment in the forest.

I had never been afraid of the forest despite the nightmare that had been my introduction to its secrets. Forests were full of concealment and surprise and I had known that from the beginning. I took delight in exploring Savernake. It was by no means an empty land. It seethed with people: Sir Edward’s ranger, the foresters, the villagers whose pigs grubbed for nuts in the undergrowth in the autumn, the poachers who risked their lives to take the Queen’s deer, the thieves, gypsies, runaways, witches. I saw them all and avoided them as much as I could, slipping between the trees like a wraith, like a hind.

Now that I had a bedchamber to myself, it was easy enough to slip away at night, simply by climbing down the ivy that covered the old brick wall of the manor. I knew every ancient oak in the forest now including the one that marked the boundary of Edward’s land with its huge bulging belly. It was rumoured to be the oldest tree in the woods, already ancient when the Conqueror had claimed Savernake along with the rest of the kingdom, a tree in possession of old magic. I had heard Dame Margery whispering to the scullery maid, with many gestures to ward off evil, that the witches sought its power to summon the devil. I could imagine that they did and I shuddered to think of it. Old magic was dangerous and unpredictable. Even though I had never dealt in it myself, I had an instinct for it, never knowing where my knowledge had come from, only knowing that I saw and heard things that others did not. However, the threat of heresy, of witchcraft, haunted my every step. I thought of my mother and longed for an ordinary life, free of visions, untouched by magic.

One day, when I had tired of my lessons with the chaplain, who was even more tedious than usual, I asked permission to visit the privy and rather than return to the schoolroom went instead out into the garden and through the orchard gate into the forest. It was high summer, hot and heavy. The closeness of the air made me want to sleep. I followed a track through the dreamy woods, until I came to the top of hill where another of the old oaks grew, the Duke’s Vaunt, named for my uncle Protector Somerset, who had liked to hunt here. From there the view was wide out across the treetops and down to the cottages below, where a number of youths and maids cavorted naked in the pond, their shrieks of excitement and pleasure floating up to me. What I saw of their sport made me feel even hotter and I plunged back into the woods feeling that I was spying. Instead, I found a warm clearing used by the charcoal burners for one of their kilns. The sun cut through the trees and the wild raspberries grew and I sat down to eat some. They were sweet and burst on my tongue like sunshine and I ate too many, greedy for them, until my tummy ached.

I must have fallen asleep after that, although I don’t remember. I do remember waking because it was sudden and frightening and there was a pain in my head that felt like a shout.

‘Cat! Wake up!’

It was Darrell.

‘Danger to you. Run. Hide…’

I didn’t question. Already I could hear it, the clash of steel on steel, brutal, closer by the second. I dived through brambles, cowering behind the widespread roots of a nearby tree, shaking.

They had reached the clearing. There were only two men, for all the noise and fury, but they fought with a ruthless intensity that was terrifying. I watched through the veil of bracken and nettle. The light glanced off the sword blades in a run of fire. The crack of metal on metal bounced off the trees. It was not like anything I had seen before; I’d seen men fight, in practice, as a game, even in earnest when blood ran too hot, but it had not been like this. These men were dressed strangely and their swords were like none I had ever known.

The conflict was as brief as it was brutal. The shorter and stockier of the two men was lighter on his feet than his bulk might have suggested. He parried a blow aimed for his neck and counter-attacked, dancing forward on the balls of his feet, beneath the guard of his opponent to slide his blade between his ribs.

Blood spurted. The stench of it made me want to retch. I had seen wounds before. I had even seen death in my short life. It was ever present in the pecked corpses that hung from the gibbets at crossroads to the beggars dying in the filth of the gutter. It stalked childbirth and shadowed every step we all took. It had taken both my parents before I was a year old. Yet to witness such violence in death was still unusual for me.

The murderer looked around quick, furtive, and then dragged the body roughly towards the kiln. As I heard the crack of bones, I stuffed my hand into my mouth, biting down on my knuckles to crush my screams. He was trying to push the corpse into the furnace, which glowed with the sullen light of old burning, but the body would not fit. Finally, with much cursing under his breath, he managed to wedge it inside. Grey smoke belched suddenly from the open roof. Soon, I knew, it would start to smell of burning flesh.

Despite my attempts to keep still and quiet I must have made a sound. I was shaking, my hand pressed to my mouth to keep the sickness down. The murderer’s head came up. He turned slowly, like a hunting dog scenting the air. I saw his face clearly then, the lank hair darkened with sweat and his narrowed blue eyes. He withdrew his sword from the corpse, cleaning it with great deliberation on the grass. Then he took a step towards my hiding place and I flattened myself even closer to the roots like a cowering mouse. There was no sound but the slam of my heart against my ribs as I waited for him to find me. I could feel Darrell with me. He was afraid also, but there was anger in him too, and frustration, and despair. His feelings seemed to sweep through mine, merging with them, flowing like a tide. Any moment now I knew we would be discovered.

The ground vibrated the same way it had when I had seen the apparition of the woman on horseback only this time the noise was louder, the vibrations more intense. The man’s head snapped around. His breath hissed in on a fierce whisper.

‘King’s men!’

He ran.

The air was full of noise now, the thunder of hooves raising dust from the track. I saw the flash of men through the trees, cavalry, with buff coats and crimson sashes, a whole column of them. I waited until they had gone and the world had turned quiet and then I waited some more. I could not have moved had I wished it. I was paralysed with terror and confusion.

Stiffly, I stood and stretched, feeling the tension slowly leach from my body leaving me exhausted. Darrell had gone. I felt light-headed, as though my mind was empty.

King’s men…

Yet we had a queen now, Elizabeth, and before her another queen. There were no king’s men in England any more and had not been for more than a decade.

I walked home very slowly along the track. It didn’t occur to me that the riders might return. I made no attempt to hide. The forest was in one of its silent moods when it felt as though nothing lived, nothing moved in it. I felt dizzy and drained of emotion. I placed one foot in front of the other and thus I got back to Wolf Hall.

‘You imagined it, lovey,’ Liz said later. I was lying on my bed and she was stroking my hair, soothing me, as though I were still a child. ‘Doubtless you were asleep and dreaming. Raspberries can give you nightmares.’

All the raspberries had given me was an ache in my stomach. However, I said nothing. When I had arrived back at Wolf Hall I realised for the first time that my skirts were in shreds and that there were leaves in my hair and dirt on my face. I had had to come up with some explanation and I thought it best to stick as closely to the truth as I could. So I said that I had witnessed a fight in the woods and seen a troop of soldiers, and had run from them in terror.

I had not, however, foreseen the consequences of my words. There was uproar. The foresters were called out and word was sent to raise the villagers to arms. The whole of Savernake was scoured for these intruders who threatened the Queen’s peace.

I knew they would not find them. I knew they had not been from our time. Like the nightmare vision of the galloping horse and its headless rider they were apparitions from another present, one that I could not explain, but no less dangerous for all that. Such spirits would have been sufficient, indeed, to set Dame Margery off crossing herself and muttering against the devil but fortunately she was occupied in making sure that there were sufficient provisions for the men hunting my ghosts.

‘There are no soldiers,’ one of the foresters groused as they came in late in the afternoon, hot, angry, spoiling for a fight. ‘The maid imagined it all. The kilns are all cold and there is no body of a dead man half burned.’

I was in disgrace. I did not care as I wanted to be alone to talk to Darrell, but when I tried to find him he was not there. My call to him echoed emptily through my mind with no reply. Perhaps he thought I would nag him with questions, for there were so many things I wanted to ask; how had he known I was in trouble, had he seen what I had seen? Disconsolate, I put my head down on my pillow and closed my eyes.

Thank you. I sent the message to him anyway and felt the faintest of acknowledgements, so brief it was like a flutter across my mind, yet as warm as an embrace the same. I had the sense not to ask for more. I smiled and fell asleep

Chapter 5

Alison, 1560

She awoke to find Edward touching her. He insisted that she sleep naked for this very purpose, so that she was always available to him, even though sometimes she lay awake for hours shivering in the cold. Even when he did not come to her she was obliged to remain uncovered in case he should decide to visit her bed after a night spent carousing on the town. He would roll in, his breath smelling of wine, and demand that she open her thighs for him. No preamble, no words of love. At least when he was not drunk he made some pretence at arousing her first.

His hands swept over her breasts and down across the curve of her stomach. She felt nothing, nothing but an anger that grew with each day. She wanted to go to the privy but she did not dare leave the bed.

She had been such a fool. She should have run away when she had the chance that day in Marlborough. She would have survived somehow. At the time she had told herself it was all for the best; as Edward’s kept mistress she lacked for nothing. She had had the baby to consider as well. It was vital that she protected them both. She had thought Edward would do that.

How she regretted her weakness now she was so demeaned, helpless, of no account. Edward rolled on top of her. It was all over quickly and clumsily. With the amount of wenching he indulged in, she would have expected him to be more proficient by now. Odd how it had all seemed so enchanting before Arthur had been born. She had been in love with him then though.

He stood up, leaving her lying splayed on the bed, the cold air washing over her.

‘You return to Wolf Hall today,’ he said.

She gaped at him.

He shrugged on his robe and poured wine for himself, refusing to look at her. Outside, the chatter and clatter of London was all around but Alison heard nothing of it. Her head buzzed.

‘I am to wed.’ He was still avoiding her gaze. A line of colour stung his cheek beneath the beard.

She felt as though she could not breathe. Had she really thought that he would marry her? Had she still dared to hope for it? How much more of a fool could she be, when he had refused to acknowledge her, hidden her away, bound her to silence, taken her son away?

She dragged the covers over her, her entire body chilled. ‘Who is she?’

He shook his head. ‘I cannot tell you. It is a secret.’

More secrets. They ruled him. She wondered if he had asked the Queen’s permission or if that was where the difficulty lay.

Stubborn hope lifted in her heart though. Perhaps this was a political match and after a little while he would send for her again. In the same moment she felt fury, with herself, with him. How much more misuse would she accept? She could no longer fool herself that this was best for her—or for her child.

‘In a few months I will find you a husband too, give you a dowry.’ He was looking eager now, almost pleading. ‘Someone who is…’ He stopped.

Not too particular? Alison thought savagely. Prepared to accept his discarded mistress if the pill was sweetened with enough money? She could not pretend any longer. There was a bitter taste on her tongue. She had chosen this, humiliated herself for a security for herself and her son that had proved an illusion.

‘What about Arthur?’ She made herself ask although she already knew the answer. Arthur had been taken from her as soon as he had been born. For a little while, Edward had indulged the pretence that she would see him again when he was weaned. It was the way things were done, he said. She was a lady not a wet nurse.

The truth was that he had wanted her all for himself. She had been his plaything and the child had been a nuisance. Now Edward no longer wanted either of them. So she had go.

‘Arthur stays with me,’ Edward said.

Alison clutched the sheet a little tighter.

‘But I will see him?’ she said. She could hear the begging in her voice.

‘It’s better you do not.’

Her fingers ached from her grip on the sheet. She did not notice. Her head ached too, a sharp stabbing pain behind the eyes, but she blinked it back trying to concentrate.

‘Better for whom?’

Edward looked surprised. ‘For Arthur, of course. I will place him in a noble household when the time comes. He will want for nothing.’

Except a name and a mother’s love, Alison thought. The pain had spread to her throat now. It felt like a blade that threatened to cut her if she swallowed. Her chest was too tight.

‘It will be better for you too.’ Edward refilled his cup. Some wine splashed, red as old blood. ‘It will be a new start.’

Fury spurted up in her that he thought her memories, her love for her child, could be so easily discarded. The callous arrogance of it stole her breath.

‘You mean that my new husband would hardly want to be saddled with another man’s by-blow as a constant reminder of his wife’s lack of chastity,’ she said.

Edward looked shocked, more so at her crudity than the sentiment. He did not reply.

Alison sat up and reached for her robe, needing to protect herself against the thought, against her lover, against her own weakness. She felt powerless. If she went against Edward’s will he would throw her out onto the street as carelessly as a pile of rags, justifying his actions by accusing her of ingratitude. But she would never give Arthur up. As well rip her heart out. Nor would she marry a man of Edward’s choosing. She had absolutely no intention of being parcelled off to some yeoman farmer in order to tidy her away. She was a gentleman’s daughter even if he was long dead and she had come down in the world.

Now was not the time to show defiance though. She would need to be cunning and bide her time. And she would need to be brave too and show more backbone than she had done so far.

‘It will be pleasant to see Wiltshire again, I suppose.’ She forced the words out. ‘Though I shall miss you, my love.’

He looked gratified and bent to kiss her. The contempt rose in her throat. He was so gullible.

‘I shall need some new clothes.’ She pressed her advantage.

‘You will have a trousseau ere long.’ He was not as much of a fool as he looked.

‘Just one new gown for winter.’ She busied herself about the room, looking, planning. How much could she take with her to Wolf Hall? Edward would probably be quite generous if she were prepared to go quietly and would overlook the odd item that went missing, though her thefts would have to be small. A few silver dress pins, the pomander encrusted with emeralds, perhaps even his gold crucifix since it was a sign of nothing but his hypocrisy. It was not as though he had ever been generous with gifts. He owed it to her. And one day soon it would enable her to make a new start.

She had nothing. She felt her shoulders slump as despair took her. She was less than nothing. But this misery was why she had not had the courage to leave him before. It cast her down when she most needed to be strong. It would not win this time. She had had enough of being used and she wanted something better.

‘I shall be ready to leave within the week,’ she said, and was rewarded with another quick, clumsy kiss, the prize for being complaisant. When he took a purse out of his pocket and extracted a few gold coins, she felt a flash of triumph.

This was where it began. This was where she started to take back.

Mary, December 1560

That winter, Alison came back. She had changed. I think perhaps I had imagined that she would not return. She had slipped from my mind like a wraith, lost beneath the detail of day-to-day life until suddenly one frosty morning she was standing by the bare hawthorn hedge, one hand on the gate, wearing a new woollen riding hood of orange tawny. She saw me and smiled, half raising a hand in greeting before she pushed open the gate and came up the path towards me.

It was an odd moment. I felt an impulse to run to her and embrace her though I had no notion why. She dispelled that quickly enough, however, offering a cool cheek for my kiss, in the French fashion. She was seventeen years old now to my thirteen and I felt gauche in the face of such elegance.

‘You are home!’ I said, although I doubted that Alison any more than I thought of Wolf Hall as her home.

‘Only until I wed.’ She was examining the stitching on her gloves, not meeting my eyes. ‘Lord Seymour has found me a husband.’

Our cousin Edward had been restored to his earldom the year before and was even more grand now and further beyond our reach. He had been building a new house a few miles distant at Tottenham; Wolf Hall being too old and inconvenient for him. I wondered if the new house, and his plans for Alison, meant that he would be spending more time at Savernake.

‘You’re to wed.’ I parroted her words, knowing I sounded simple. There was so much I wanted to ask her but could not. She did not have a child with her. I wondered what had happened to it. Was it a boy or a girl? Where had she been, and with whom? Who had paid for the beautiful orange tawny? Cousin Edward, perhaps, since it appeared he wanted her well turned out for her marriage. Alison’s silence prevented me from blurting out any questions though. There was a wall of reserve about her and she had withdrawn behind it.

There was no suggestion this time that Alison and I should share a chamber. Suddenly she had become an adult, elevated above me. She was excused any work and spent much of her time in a huddle with the other women, talking about mysterious matters ranging from the assembly of a trousseau to the management of a household. Perhaps Liz might have thought it would be useful for me to listen and learn but, often as not, I was not invited. Dame Margery and Alison were still close as two peas in the pod and since neither of them liked me much, I was left out. I did see some of Alison’s new clothes: the scarlet wool petticoats, soft and warm, which I envied, and the fragile silk-lined slippers, which seemed a pointless extravagance. Alison’s future husband was a well-to-do yeoman but there was no question that she would need practical clothing in which to work.

‘Do you like Master Whitney?’ I asked her one day. We were in the solar and it was raining, the water running down the diamond panes like tears. For once, I had been included in the group. We were trying to embroider in the dim grey light of winter, with only one sputtering candle to aid us. My eyes smarted.

Alison let her hands rest in her lap as she looked up. ‘He is well enough. Liking has nothing to do with marriage.’

‘He likes you.’ Dame Margery dug her in the ribs, letting loose a raucous laugh. Alison gave a pale smile in return. It did not seem to please her that her future husband lusted after her but Dame Margery was right. Even I had noticed the hungriness in his eyes when he watched her. I could not have borne for him to touch me. There was something perpetually angry about him and it felt dangerous. I’d heard he had an uncertain temper and I thought Alison was making a mistake. Not that she had a choice.

‘He is wealthy and of good standing,’ Alison said. ‘I could not hope for better.’

There was an odd silence. She had sounded almost wistful.

‘But you are a gentleman’s daughter,’ I said. ‘Surely…’

She looked at me hard, though she said nothing, and I knew that she was thinking of the scandal of her pregnancy. Yes, I had been tactless. Not many men would have been prepared to wed her when her chastity was so clearly compromised. I wondered if Edward had paid Whitney handsomely to overlook it.

‘You will find,’ she said, after a moment, ‘when it is your turn, that being the daughter of a queen and a gentleman avails you nothing if you have no fortune or… beauty… to speak of. You will take what is on offer and be glad of it.’

I knew I would not.

‘I do not wish to wed,’ I said hotly. ‘I cannot see that it makes anyone very happy, so why do it?’

Dame Margery’s mouth fell open in shock at such heresy but Alison simply shook her head. ‘You are so determined to be naïve, Mary Seymour,’ she said. ‘Can you truly be in such ignorance of how the world works?’

I was not, of course. I observed the lives of others even if nothing happened to me. Yet it was true that I could see little benefit for a woman in marriage. If it were a love match, it would end in betrayal or death or both. One only needed to look at the example of my parents, or old Queen Mary, to see that. If it was a marriage for profit, then it seemed to me the advantage was usually on the man’s side for the price exacted on the woman was very high.

‘Her Majesty the Queen has not wed,’ I pointed out.

‘She will,’ Dame Margery said. She cut her thread neatly with a little pair of silver scissors. ‘She needs an heir.’

Queen Elizabeth, I realised, was exactly like a man in that respect.

‘Perhaps Lord Seymour will find you a husband at the hunting party,’ Alison said. ‘It is not just about my betrothal; there is business to be conducted.’

Thus I learned something else new. Events that were called one thing so often had a quite different purpose. I had heard that there was to be a grand celebration of Alison’s betrothal, a week of feasting and hunting in the forest. The household was already buzzing with the preparations. Yet it seemed it was not about Alison, or even about her forthcoming marriage.

‘I am too young,’ I said, to offset the chill of disquiet that touched me. ‘I am not yet fourteen.’

‘Old enough to be promised,’ Dame Margery opined. She stood up, wincing a little. ‘Ach, I’m aching all over.’

‘Take some of my juniper oil,’ Alison said. ‘It will ease your bones.’ She smiled at Dame Margery and I saw with surprise that there was genuine affection between them. I had never seen Alison offer kindness to anyone before. Nor had I thought of Dame Margery as anything other than an old woman given to small spites. Alison was right; life was not always the way I saw it.

Once Dame Margery had left the room and Alison and I were alone, I expected more of her provocation but instead we sat in silence for a while as we worked. Or rather I did. Looking at Alison, I realised that her hands were resting on the material in her lap again and she was staring into space.

‘I haven’t seen my son since he was a few weeks old,’ she said, suddenly. ‘They took him away and gave him to a wet nurse.’ She looked at me and her eyes were such a bright blue with unshed tears that I felt shocked. ‘His name is Arthur.’

I stared at her, uncomprehending. Why was she telling me this? Why now, when she had not spoken of the baby at all since her return to Wolf Hall? I could sense pain in her: huge, ungovernable pain, but I did not understand why she felt it. I had not known my mother at all but even had she lived I would have been consigned to the care of servants. She would not have raised me herself. My father had taken me to London with him as though I were just another piece of luggage, left in the hallway of his house for someone else to find and deal with. Why should Alison’s son be different?

She had seen the blankness in my eyes.

‘I would not expect you to understand,’ she said bitterly.

‘I…’ I grasped after something to say. ‘Surely when he is older you will see him again? It’s only whilst he is nursing—’

She gripped my wrist so suddenly and so sharply that I winced.

‘No,’ she said harshly. ‘I do not even know where he is. They will not give me any news. They say it is better I know nothing of him and he knows nothing of me and so it will remain for ever.’

I understood now and was struck dumb by the finality of it. She had lost her child or rather he had been stolen from her. I wanted to lie to comfort her, but the words would not come and anyway there was no comfort in lies. We both knew that her fate was to wed and provide lawful heirs for her husband. No one would speak of Arthur again. Her future children would not even know their half-brother existed.

Alison stood up, made clumsy by her tears, and the embroidery fell unheeded to the ground. I picked it up when the door had closed behind her. It was exquisite; a piece of pure white linen with a perfect rose embroidered on it in white thread that glowed with all the beauty of the flower itself. She was a very talented seamstress. I folded it carefully and put it in the wooden box where she kept her needles and thread. There was a very fine gold crucifix in there as well, and some silver pins and her pomander, smelling faintly of orange and cloves.

I had a dream that night. It was not a vision in the sense I normally saw them though it was no less vivid for that. I was outside, in a landscape quite different from the woods and fields of Savernake. This was high country with a wide blue bowl of a sky and tracks as white as bone. I could feel the sun beating down on my head. In my hand was Alison’s box. The shining walnut was dazzlingly bright, the initials AB bold and black. The sun-warmed wood felt hot against my palm.

It was a beautiful day but in the dream I felt uneasy. There was a flutter in my chest as though time was running out.

I must be certain to leave word safely for Alison, I thought. Before it is too late.

White dust was rising along the track. Someone was coming. My heart leaped, and then plummeted again. Something was wrong. I felt it so strongly through the dream, that sense of growing dread and a fear that clawed at my throat. Standing outside of myself, I saw the box fall from my hand and open, scattering its contents across the grass—a coin, a carved wooden chess piece, a sprig of rosemary that smelled sweet and fresh.

I woke up suddenly, gasping for breath. The room was icy cold but I was drenched in sweat. I lay racked by shivers, trying to shake off that huge, smothering sense of horror, but it clung to me like cobwebs. Then Darrell:

‘Cat? What’s happened? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. A bad dream.’

I sensed his relief and the clumsy hug he sent me. It made me smile and eased the horror. Even so, the dread still lingered at the corners of my mind and I did not sleep again that night.

*

I had a new outfit that winter, less extravagant than Alison’s trousseau but still very fine. It was green velvet with gold and a matching hood trimmed with pearls. It was too big for me, though Liz said that I would grow into it fast enough. I had wanted to wear it for the first day of the hunting party but Liz had laughed and said it was not that sort of gown so I was obliged to wear my dull old crimson velvet instead.

Wolf Hall was in a positive fluster over so important an occasion, although I noticed that whilst Alison was supposed to be the focus of celebration, she, and indeed the rest of the women, seemed largely forgotten. Cousin Edward rode in with a whole host of cronies – men strutting like peacocks in their finery, attended by servants, surrounded by a cacophony of dogs and a host of hunting falcons.

I didn’t like hunting, but I sat a horse well enough and was given no option other than to join the party when they rode out in the frosty morning of the following day. There was to be a grand breakfast later, but as I shivered deep in my crimson velvet, I could think of many things I would prefer to do on a cold December morning.

The forest was full of pale light and misty glades that morning. At the back of the group the women hung back, chattering, but almost drowned out by the call of the horns and the baying of the dogs. The Queen was a keen hunter, as her mother had been before her, and many noble ladies enjoyed the chase, but none of us had the bloodlust on us that day. Early on, I caught a glimpse of a white hart and the dogs picked up the scent almost as fast. I willed it gone with all my strength and felt enormous relief when it disappeared into the mist. No one else was happy. The dogs sniffed around, running in disconsolate circles. The riders and the footmen grumbled as they waited for another scent. The excitement of the morning slowly fizzled into disappointment.

It was a subdued party that sat down to eat a couple of hours later, but the ale and the wine, the cold venison pies and the roasted chicken soon helped to assuage the bad mood. One of cousin Edward’s squires came to sit beside me, a merry fellow with laughing black eyes and a mop of black hair, who introduced himself as Harry Stapleton. I saw Alison watching me, as though to say, ‘I told you so’, but Liz was smiling on us benignly and after a little I forgot to be suspicious that Edward wanted to marry me off too because I liked Harry Stapleton. He made me laugh.

Suddenly it seemed everyone was laughing. The sun came out and the day felt almost warm. There was anticipation in the air again, and merriment. Alison had coaxed Dame Margery up onto her betrothal gift from Master Whitney—a highly bred white palfrey with a red and gold leather saddle. The horse had an uncertain temperament, like its master, but Alison was praising it lavishly, casting a glance at him under her eyelashes as she did so. Whitney was red and raucous from all the wine he had taken and put a clumsy arm around Alison’s waist. I heard his voice ring out:

‘I’d rather my own filly, even if she has already been had by other stallions first, than the old grey mare!’

There was a horrible silence, all talk, all laughter suspended. Someone tittered; a couple of Whitney’s men, as drunk as he, roared their approval of the jest. Alison had dropped the reins and stood looking pale and stricken. Whitney tried to kiss her again, but she turned her face aside and so he slapped her, the sound shockingly loud in the quiet. In the moment that followed I noticed several things at the same time. I saw Alison’s body jerk with the force of the blow; I saw Edward take a step forward, as if to intervene, his face a mirror of uncertainty. He stopped and did nothing. The sound of the slap echoed about the clearing, so loud it raised the birds from the trees.

To me it seemed as though the silence that followed lasted hours although it could only have been a moment. I knew with a horrible clarity what happened next; I had seen it before.

The palfrey bolted. I heard Dame Margery scream and saw her make a grab for the pommel, knuckles white. Everything happened very quickly then. The horse crashed across the clearing, sending food, wine, platters and flagons flying, knocking over one of the footmen who tried to catch the reins, trampling the skirts of one of the women who screamed like a fishwife.

There was a low branch blocking the path from the clearing. We all saw it. A number of us shouted a warning but it was too late. It hit Dame Margery across the throat and severed her head as neatly as any executioner.

The last thing I remember was seeing the white palfrey galloping away down the track with Dame Margery’s headless corpse still swaying in the saddle and her silver-trimmed cloak flying out behind, a horrible repetition of the vision I had had on the very first day I had come to Wolf Hall.

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