Ah well, the poor woman died. A happy relief. She was always ill with this complaint or that. You can see her tombstone in the church: her name, her age, her virtue. Underneath, I wrote her epitaph: 'I told you I was ill.'

My chaplain is now glaring at me, though I can see the laughter bubbling within him. He knows I lie. I loved all my wives more dearly than life itself. Old Roger can only deal with tragedy by turning it into a joke; that's how I survive, that's how I sleep when all those ghosts swarm round my bed. Henry, the Great Beast, glaring at me with his red, mad, piggy eyes. Beside him Wolsey with his olive, Italianate face. The men I have killed; the murderers I have trapped. I always close my eyes and summon up a face that's never there: long and dark, gentle-eyed and merry-mouthed, my eternal friend, Benjamin Daunbey. So, I go back, searching for his soul down the long, dusty corridors of the years when Henry the Great Beast terrorised England and Wolsey ruled both Church and State. When London was all a-bubble with sickness, and murder, in all its horror, made its bloody hand felt.

Chapter 1

The year of 1523 was sharp and cruel. A violent, snarling time when princes dreamed of war; all of Europe teetered on the brink of a great precipice, ready to tear itself apart over divisions in religion. In Denmark, Christian II had been deposed for cruelty. In Switzerland, Zwingli attacked the Pope and called him the Antichrist, whilst in Brussels, two of Martin Luther's adherents were burnt alive in roaring flames. Across the Narrow Seas, Francis II dreamed of being another Charlemagne, whilst long-jawed Charles V, the Hapsburg Emperor, planned on finding rivers of gold in the distant Americas.

In England, however, little had changed… thus far. Henry VIII, the fat bastard, the mouldwarp of Merlin's prophecies, still clung to sanity.