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swiftly, “Our time is now your time. You have made it so. The situation was none of our choosing. And if your time is now ours, then surely we are entitled to the knowledge that accompanies our time.” She looked at the high priest. “For the comfort of our mind.”
    Brill said, “Your Holiness—”
    “No, Queen Anne is correct. Her argument is valid. You will designate a qualified researcher to answer any questions she has—any at all—about the life she might have had, or the course of events England took when the queen did not become a sacred hostage.”
    Brill nodded stiffly.
    “Good-bye, Your Grace,” Her Holiness said. “I shall return in two weeks to inspect your situation again.”
    Two weeks? The high priest was not due for another inspection for six months. Lambert glanced at Culhane to see his reaction to this blatant political fault-hunting, but he was gazing at the floor, to which Anne Boleyn had sunk in another of her embarrassing curtsies, the amber velvet of her skirts spread around her like gold.
     

     
    They sent a commoner to explain her life to her, and the life she had lost. A commoner. And he had as well the nerve to be besotted with her. Anne always knew. She tolerated such fellows, like that upstart musician Smeaton, when they were useful to her. If this Master Culhane dared to make any sort of declaration, he would receive the same sort of snub Smeaton once had. Inferior persons should not look to be spoken to as noblemen.
    He sat on a straight-backed chair in her tower room, looking humble enough, while Anne sat in the great carved chair with her hands tightly folded to keep them from shaking.
    “Tell me how I came to die in 1536.” God’s blood! Had ever before there been such a sentence uttered?
    Culhane said, “You were beheaded. Found guilty of treason.” He stopped and flushed.
    She knew, then. In a queen, there was one cause for a charge of treason. “He charged me with adultery. To remove me, so he could marry again.”
    “Yes.”
    “To Jane Seymour.”
    “Yes.”
    “Had I first given him a son?”
    “No,” Culhane said.
    “Did Jane Seymour give him a son?”
    “Yes. Edward the Sixth. But he died at sixteen, a few years after Henry.”
    There was vindication in that, but not enough to stem the sick feeling in her gut. Treason. And no son…There must have been more than desire for the Seymour bitch. Henry must have hated her. Adultery…
    “With whom?”
    Again the oaf flushed. “With five men, Your Grace. Everyone knew the charges were false, created merely to excuse his own cuckoldry— even your enemies admitted such.”
    “Who were they?”
    “Sir Henry Morris. Sir Francis Weston. William Brereton. Mark Smeaton. And…and your brother George.”
    For a moment she thought she would be sick. Each name fell like a blow, the last like the ax itself. George. Her beloved brother, so talented at music, so high-spirited and witty…Henry Norris, the king’s friend. Weston and Brereton, young and lighthearted but always, to her, respectful and careful…and Mark Smeaton, the oaf made courtier because he could play the virginals.
    The long, beautiful hands clutched the sides of the chair. But the moment passed, and she could say with dignity, “They denied the charges?”
    “Smeaton confessed, but he was tortured into it. The others denied the charges completely. Henry Norris offered to defend your honor in single combat.”
    Yes, that was like Harry: so old-fashioned, so principled. She said, “They all died.” It was not a question: If she had died for treason, they would have, too. And not alone; no one died alone. “Who else?”
    Culhane said, “Maybe we should wait for the rest of this, Your—”
    “Who else? My father?”
    “No. Sir Thomas More, John Fisher—”
    “More? For my…” She could not say adultery .
    “Because he would not swear to the Oath of Supremacy, which made the king and not the pope head of the church in England. That act opened