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King's stores, on one occasion hundreds of longbows. My sweating boatman was not inclined to talk, and I stared out at the fields. Normally by now the ears of corn would be turning golden, but after the bad weather of the last few weeks they were still green.
    My visit to Ellen still lay heavy on my mind, especially Hob's words about lawyers having their ways of finding things. I hated the thought of going behind her back, but the present situation could not continue.

    A T LENGTH the soaring brick towers of Hampton Court came into view, the chimneys topped with gold-painted statues of lions and mythical beasts glinting in the sun. I disembarked at the wharf, where soldiers armed with halberds stood on duty. My heart beat hard with apprehension as I looked across the wide lawns to Wolsey's palace. I showed my letter to one of the guards. He bowed deeply, called another guard across and told him to take me inside.
    I remembered my only previous visit to Hampton Court, to see Archbishop Cranmer after having been falsely imprisoned in the Tower. It was that memory which lay at the root of my fear. I had heard Cranmer was down in Dover; they said he had reviewed the soldiers there on a white horse, dressed in armour. It sounded extraordinary, though surely no stranger than anything else happening now. The King, I learned from the guard, was at Whitehall, so at least there was no risk of seeing him. Once I had displeased him, and King Henry never forgot a grudge. As we reached a wide oaken doorway, I prayed to the God I hardly believed in any more that the Queen would keep her promise and that, whatever she wanted, it be not a matter of politics.
    I was led up a spiral staircase into the outer rooms of the Queen's chambers. I pulled off my cap as we entered a room where servants and officials, most wearing the Queen's badge of St Catherine in their caps, bustled to and fro. We passed through another room and then another, each quieter as we approached the Queen's presence chamber. There were signs of new decoration, fresh paint on the walls and the elaborately corniced ceilings, wide tapestries so bright with colour they almost hurt the eye. Herbs and branches were laid on the rush matting covering the floor, and there was a heavenly medley of scents; almonds, lavender, roses. In the second room parrots fluttered and sang in roomy cages. There was a monkey in a cage too; it had been clambering up the bars but stopped and stared at me, huge eyes in a wrinkled, old man's face. We paused before another guarded door, the Queen's motto picked out in gold on a scroll above: To be useful in what I do. The guard opened it and I finally stepped into the presence chamber.
    This was the outer sanctum; the Queen's private rooms lay beyond, behind another door with a halberdier outside. After two years of marriage Queen Catherine was still in high favour with the King; when he had been away last year, leading his armies in France, she had been appointed Queen Regent. Yet remembering the fates of his other wives, I could not but think how, at a word from him, all her guards could in a moment become jailers.
    The walls of the presence chamber were decorated with some of the new wallpaper, intricate designs of leaves on a green background, and the room was furnished with elegant tables, vases of flowers and high-backed chairs. There were only two people present. The first was a woman in a plain cornflower-blue dress, her hair grey beneath her white coif. She half-rose from her chair, giving me an apprehensive look. The man with her, tall and thin and wearing a lawyer's robe, put his hand gently on her shoulder to indicate she should stay seated. Master Robert Warner, the Queen's solicitor, his thin face framed by a long beard that was greying fast though he was of an age with me, came across and took my hand.
    'Brother Shardlake, thank you for coming.' As though I could have refused. But I was pleased to see him, Warner had always been