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7 January 1536 (Greenwich Palace, audience chamber of the Earl of Wiltshire), hour of Vespers

“…and, this, is an account of her last hours, written by Sir Edmund.”

Wiltshire holds the missive by the very edges of his fingertips, but does not leave his seat by the fire.

By her fifth step, Susan comes close enough to his person to lift it, and close enough to see the seal is broken.

“Opened?”

“Of course.”

At her proximity, his fleethound puppy stirs, and leaps his paws up to the green damask of the arm of his seat, bruising the black velvet of her sleeve with his nose.

Wiltshire scoops him away, but his glance remains fixed away from her face: it razes the tapestry above the fire as busily as any cloth merchant, as rapt upon it as though he has never seen or heard its story (the conversion of Empress Alexandra, by Saint George).

He does not seem as…triumphant, as she would expect him to be, over this new intelligence.

Nor the opposite, exactly, but: since his conveyance of this fresh intelligence, he has more the look of a man standing upon a wharf, overlooking rising waters…more, the look of a man, who is unsure of whether his fortune is good or ill.

But that does not mean she wishes to be near him.

Susan takes it, and draws back.

“Is there anything you would like me to tell her?”

“Sit over there,” he says, sternly, pointing towards a velvet-padded chest opposite, then—sighs, as heavily as Archbishop Cranmer, after some fiery exhortation, at pulpit, and appends, more softly, “if you please…since you will not…”

He flaps his ringed hand at the chair next to his, in reference to her earlier rejection of seat.

Susan obliges him.

“As it turns out…the Baroness Willoughby was on a pilgrimage, and happened to fall off her horse near Kimbolton. The Bedingfields let her take shelter, which she also happened to take after shoving past the doors of the Princess Dowager’s chambers. And there she remained, until Her Highness breathed her last.”

An uprush of emotion comes, and then the harsh, hot pressure of tears. In panic, she massages the hollow of her throat, and stares them into oblivion—for she has never cried in the presence of a Boleyn, and she is most determined to keep the precedent.

“So…you may, in all honesty, tell the Lady Mary that her mother did not die alone.”

“Why?”

“‘Why?’”

Wiltshire shrugs, his feet restless in the rushes as he rubs the silvery ear of his hound, then:

“Because her mother’s friend did not lack courage?”

“No, I meant…why are you asking this of me? Permitting it, of me?”

His eyes fix upon her. Their gold shades, from the colour of the flames which buckle in the recesses, to umber.

“I have already sent a messenger with a license for your visit. Even now he is on a post-horse, to Beaulieu. But, if you fear entrapment…”

He removes a silver ring which sports a bull’s face, and holds it in his pinch.

“You have not answered, my lord.”

“My aunt told me you are the friend the Lady Mary has asked of most often, these late years.”

“Asked for, you mean.”

“Your license is for one day only.”

“Why would you grant me that one day, today? What difference, between today and yesterday?”

St James’s Palace Gatehouse