You will need to stoop a little, I fear.’ ‘I remember the low ceilings,’ Elizabeth replied in a hollow voice, and bent her head. Walsingham had led her uncomfortably deep inside the Tower of London, far from the sombre but spacious suite of rooms in which she had been kept during her sister Mary’s reign. The walls of the corridor dripped with water, and the space between them was so narrow, her gown brushed the damp stones on either side as she walked. She shuddered at the memory of her own unhappy time in the Tower. Nor could she forget that her own mother had ended her days here, out on the windswept green where the glossy ravens strutted and waited for blood. Today she did not wish to think about the anguish Anne Boleyn must have suffered in those last hours, though she had often considered it in her darker moments. If only she had been older, she might have been able to comfort her condemned mother in some way. But she had been so young at the time of the Queen’s execution, only two years of age and unable to understand why her pretty mother was no longer there to kiss her goodnight.
