He never sees More—a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod—without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.

‘No, no,’ I said quickly. ‘We will not hurt you. I am going to free you.’

She looked at us in horror. The gods knew what she thought I was saying. She was an Anatolian farm girl, with no reason to have ever heard Greek before. I stepped forward to put a hand on her arm, to reassure. She flinched as if expecting a blow. I saw the fear in her eyes, of rape and worse. I could not bear it. There was only one thing I could think of. I turned to Achilles and seized the front of his tunic. I kissed him. When I let go again she was staring at us. Staring and staring.

I gestured to her bonds, and back to the knife. ‘All right?’

They were studying a book about a woman who was all angsty about her husband’s dead wife. So far Sin liked the dead wife best, though because she was a girl and the most interesting character, Sin had dark suspicions she might turn out to be evil.

There was a moment when Anne gave him all her attention: her skewering dark glance. The king, too, knows how to look; blue eyes, their mildness deceptive. Is this how they look at each other? Or in some other way? For a second he understands it; then he doesn’t. He stands by a window. A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure; that something almost extinct, some small gesture toward the future, is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.