The court of Henry VIII moved like a body with too many heads.
Alice had been inside it for four days now, and she had become, by necessity, an expert in its particular rhythms. She had learned which ladies gossiped and which ones listened.
She had learned which courtiers stood close to the king because they loved him and which ones stood close because they were afraid of what he would do if they did not. She had learned the geography of power in a room: how a man's worth could be measured by his proximity to the royal chair, and how quickly that worth could evaporate.
She had also learned that someone was watching her.
It had begun on the second day — a feeling at first, the prickle at the back of the neck that she associated with academic conference presentations when she sensed a hostile question forming in the audience.
Then small things.
A page boy who appeared too often in corridors she walked through.
A courier she did not recognize who had twice been in conversation with Dorothy when Alice entered the room.
And once, at the end of an evening's entertainment — lutes, a masque, Henry clapping with genuine pleasure at a dancer's trick — she had looked across the great hall and seen a man in ecclesiastical black watching her with eyes that held the steady, patient quality of a man who was not watching out of curiosity.
He was gone when she looked again. But she did not forget the eyes.
On the fourth morning, she requested an audience with the king under the pretense of wanting to show him a piece of needlework she had completed. Henry, whose attachment to Jane was by now an open secret in the court, received her in his private chamber with only two attendants present — a mercy.
He was in a good mood. He had been hunting the day before and the exercise had loosened something in him; he was expansive, loud, pouring wine for himself from the jug on the table without waiting for a servant.
"Jane." He gestured to a chair beside his own. "Sit. Drink."
"Your Majesty is generous," Alice said, and sat, and declined the wine with a small gesture toward her health, which Henry accepted without question. Jane Seymour was known for her moderation.
She folded her hands in her lap and watched him drink. Then she said, quietly: "Your Majesty, I have heard something that troubled my sleep last night. I did not know whether to bring it to you."
Henry set down his cup. His eyes sharpened. "What did you hear?"
"It is perhaps nothing." She paused, precisely long enough. "But I have noticed a man at court that I do not recognize. A man in black — the dress of a churchman, but wearing it in a manner that seemed to me... unusual. Not the dress of a chaplain or even a bishop. More like a man using clerical dress as a disguise."
Henry's face did a complicated thing. The expansiveness collapsed and something behind it emerged — the watchfulness that she suspected was always there, beneath the bluster and the gold-embroidered vanity. He was a man who had survived by knowing when to be afraid.
"Describe him," Henry said.
"Older. Perhaps sixty. Grey about the temples. Very still — the stillness of a man who has learned that stillness is a form of power. And his eyes—" she paused, because this was the part she had practiced, the part she needed to make land correctly "—were the eyes of a man who was calculating something."
Henry was quiet for a long moment. Then he stood and moved to the window with the particular heaviness of a large man in motion, and looked out.
"You did well to tell me," he said, without turning around. "Leave it with me, Jane."
"Of course, Your Majesty." She rose. "There was one other thing. A small thing."
He turned.
"I have been thinking of the Queen," Alice said. "Of the — of the former Queen. And of what you said, that justice ought to be tempered with mercy. I have been praying on it." She met his eyes steadily. "A dead woman cannot repent. An exiled woman can. And an exiled woman is no threat to England, while a martyred queen—" she stopped herself. "Forgive me. I overstep."
Henry was looking at her with an expression she could not quite read. It was not anger. It was something more complex than anger — the expression of a man being asked to consider a thing he had already decided, which required him to reopen a door he had closed.
"You have a generous heart," he said, at last. "Some would say too generous."
"I would rather err on the side of too much mercy than too little," Alice said. "God, I think, would agree."
She curtsied and left before he could respond.
In the corridor outside, she walked quickly, her heart hammering, until she found an alcove behind a tapestry of St. George and pressed herself into it and allowed herself thirty seconds to shake.
Then she straightened, smoothed her skirts, and went to find Meg.
* * *
The girl was waiting for her at the agreed place — a turn in the back corridor that servants used, near the kitchens, where the smell of woodsmoke and roasting meat was thick enough to feel.
Meg was small and quick and had the particular invisibility of the very young and very poor, and Alice had learned in four days that this made her the most valuable person in the palace.
"Did she receive it?" Alice asked, low and fast.
"Yes, my lady. And she sent back something." Meg pressed a folded piece of paper into Alice's hand — proper paper this time, not parchment. Eleanor had gotten hold of the paper she had requested.
Alice unfolded it under the cover of her sleeve.
*Five days. I have the device. I've identified the recall symbol — I think. I'm not going to touch it until you tell me to. Also: there's a man watching us. Not a courtier. Ecclesiastical dress. He knows about the device — they found it during my interrogation and I said it was a decorative ornament. I don't think they believed me. Alice — be careful. Something else is happening here. Something that isn't just Henry and Anne. — E*
Alice read it twice. Then she pressed it flat against the stone wall and applied the candle from her small belt purse until it was ash.
A man in black. Watching both of them. Knowing about the device.
She thought about the man she had seen in the great hall. She thought about the calculating eyes.
She thought: *who in 1536 knows what that device is?*
And underneath that thought, quieter and colder: *who from outside 1536 might be here already?*