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your mother went to her unhappy death. She was agitated on that day, as workmen had been outside her prison window sawing and hammering the platform upon which she was to die. Her last pleas to your father for clemency had come to naught, and she was out of hope. It seemed for a time that all grace had left her. She was clumsy, tripping on her skirt and wringing her hands. She would rake her fingers across her face and through her hair, muttering, ‘God forgive me. God forgive me.’
    “I felt sick at my stomach and light-headed. She was pitiful and not the queen I knew she’d want to appear before the audience of her execution. So I rallied myself and went kindly to her, asking if she did not want me to brush her hair. She looked at me then and it appeared something inside of her settled. She grew very calm and said, ‘Yes please, Lady Sommerville, I would very much like that.’
    “I did the long slow strokes she so enjoyed, patting the hair down gently behind the brush, and then she asked if I would put it up and fasten it off her neck. It was when she said that I began to cry, for I knew her reasoning.” The old woman unconsciously touched the back of her own neck. “They’d imported a fine French executioner, but she was afraid of pain and wanted no hindrances to the sword’s clean cut.”
    Elizabeth found her eyes were wet, but she made no move to hide the tears from this woman, her mother’s friend in life and death.
    “When her hair was done and I’d helped her into a soft grey gown, she came to me holding that book. She was very calm by then and the terror had gone from her eyes. ‘Take this,’ she said. It is my life. Give it to my daughter, Elizabeth. Give it to her when she is grown, when she is queen. She will have need of it.’
    “I’m ashamed to admit, Majesty, I thought then that Henry’s daughter from a wife he so despised would never rule England. But I loved your mother, who was going to her death, and I said it would be my honor. And so it is my honor, these years hence, to give you this diary.”
    Lady Sommerville rose painfully from the chair. Elizabeth put out a hand to steady her and their eyes met and held.
    “Your mother died with grace, Your Majesty. She died a queen.” Lady Sommerville curtsied low and, taking Elizabeth’s white be jeweled hand, kissed her ring.
    “Thank you, kind lady,” whispered Elizabeth. “You should be proud that you have fulfilled the promise you made to my mother so long ago.”
    The old woman smiled and gazed at the Queen’s pale face.
    “You have your father’s eyes, Elizabeth, but it is your mother’s spirit shining through them.”
    Lady Sommerville turned and hobbled out the door, not bothering to close it behind her. Kat and several younger waiting ladies were poised there and came fluttering into the chamber. Elizabeth, as if in a sweet dream she wished undisturbed, raised a hand and bade them depart.
    The Queen, who throughout Lady Sommerville’s entire story had clutched the diary in her hands, now studied it carefully. It was old. The claret leather was fading to pink and the binding was fragile. There was little left of a gold leaf border, but once, she could see, it had been a very pretty book indeed. As though she were handling the wings of butterflies, Elizabeth opened the front cover. There in stylish penmanship in large black letters on yellowing parchment was the inscription
    The Diary
of
Anne Boyeln
    Elizabeth turned the page.
    4 January 1522
    Diary,
    So strange, a book of empty pages. I have never seen in all my life a thing so very odd or very wonderful as this parchment diary. For different from a book that I might read whose author offers up to me like some rich meal, his thoughts and words and deeds, this empty volume defies and mocks me, begs of me to make its pages full. But full of what?
    Thomas Wyatt, giver of this gift, insists that I am able, offering as proof that I’ve acquired, he says, the habit of writing in