Opening the door cautiously, she checked for any sign of Carpenter, and when there was none she stepped out with an odd tingle of excitement. She stifled a giggle; it felt like she was trespassing. Humming quietly to herself, she moved along the interconnecting corridors, secretly hoping she would encounter one of the servants so she could have even a passing conversation. She could pretend to be someone else! That excited her even more.
But as the time passed and she met no one, nor did she hear even the vaguest sound rising from the bowels of the vast building, she started to feel unsettled. It was as if everyone had vacated the palace during her short nap.
After a while, her wanderings brought her to the Long Gallery. She paused as she entered it, realising where she was and recalling the disturbing stories that had passed through the entire court. No one came to the Long Gallery after dark. It was only a year since William Grebe had been driven mad with terror. On that night, in high summer, he had seen the ghost of the old queen Catherine Howard running through the gallery, screaming, as she had done in life when she had begged Henry to save her before the guards had dragged her away towards her imminent death.
There were ghosts all over the palace. Jane Seymour haunting the staircase near the room where she gave birth to Edward. Even Anne Boleyn and Henry himself.
Drawing herself up proudly, she stepped into the gallery. Ghosts did not scare her; there was nothing on the other side of life that did not match what she had experienced during her years in the world. But as she reached the halfway mark along the room, she heard, or thought she did, faint words carried on the night breeze rustling under the doors. The insubstantial voice seemed to say: "Death is not the end. "
She hurried on, relieved to leave the strange mood in the gallery behind her, but as she passed through a deserted room with windows overlooking the twilit countryside, something caught her eye. In the row of black trees along the river's edge, she was sure a shadow had swept along at ground level, like the smoke from a bonfire caught in a strong wind. It had gone now, but as she stood at the window to be sure, there was a burst of flames in the trees, and another, and another. Torches igniting? she wondered. Something in those dancing fires made her unaccountably afraid. Hugging her arms around her, she watched them moving slowly, wondering who held them, why it mattered, and then, just as quickly as they had burst into life, they winked out, one by one.
For a moment longer, she watched intently, wondering if anyone would emerge from the tree line, but there was nothing. Were they watching her watching them? she wondered briefly, before discounting the idea as ridiculous; no one could see her at that distance.
Yet for all her rationalising, she felt a sudden urge to find Carpenter. Worried now by the lack of activity, and the silence, in the palace, which was unnatural at that time of the evening, she picked up her pace. Her heels beat out an insistent rhythm on the floorboards. She desperately wanted to call out, but was afraid of attracting attention to herself.
In a large room, where the queen sometimes held a reception for foreign guests before one of the masques, she came to a halt before a long mirror. She didn't know why. For a while, she stared at herself, spectral in the half-light, and had the strangest impression she was looking at someone else, someone who had spent time shaping themselves to resemble her, but who couldn't disguise the malign thoughts that lurked in the features, in the set of the mouth, or the narrowing of the eyes. It felt as if the glass wasn't there, and that she could reach through the space. But then the other Grace would grab her wrist and drag her in. She half realised something about the mirror mesmerised her, was holding her fast, and she forced herself to move on, but not before she caught sight of a shadow on the edge of the mirror following her.
She turned suddenly, but the room was empty. The shadow had been in the mirror and not in the real world, though it was gone now. It must have been a trick of the moonlight, for there was no other explanation. She decided as she hurriedly left the room that she didn't like mirrors at all.
Her feet pounded louder on the floorboards as she raced through the silent rooms, no longer trying to keep her presence a secret. Doors slammed open and shut. Corridors rang with the echoes of her passing. After a while she called out, "Hello?" but there was only the sound of her voice returning to her after a journey around the palace.
Her uneasiness mounted, like the stem of a rose being drawn up the skin of her back. Where could they all have gone? Had the alarm for the invasion sounded and everyone had fled to the security of London's walls? Could she really have missed it? Would Carpenter have forgotten to rouse her?
In the room where the palace elders usually gathered to drink into the evening, there was no one. The guards' quarters: empty. No sound rising from the servants' quarters, where she would have expected singing and laughter, perhaps even a fiddle.
She found herself at a window with a view over Henry's great clock, the colours a dull grey in the gloom. Instinctively, she knew something was wrong, but in her anxious state her thoughts skittered too wildly across the details of what she saw. After a moment, it came to her: the clock was running backwards. She watched the gentle judder of the minute hand as it shifted counterclockwise and shivered, although she was not sure why.
Its workings are wrong, she thought. That is all.
The season now showed winter, the month December.
Overcome with the compulsion to search the darkening countryside around the palace, she ran to another window overlooking the approach. At first all was still, but then came another brief burst of fire, closer than the last one she had seen, and another way across to the right, gone almost in the blink of an eye.
The fires were hypnotic, and she waited for another while she considered what could possibly have caused them. Instead, she saw grey shadows bounding sinuously across the fields towards the palace, like foxes only larger. She tried to count them, but they moved too fast and were soon out of the moonlight and lost from view.
She stepped away from the window, her heart tap-tapping.
The kitchens! she thought suddenly. Everyone would be gathered there, telling stories, servants and gentlemen together, in the warmth of the ovens. It was the only explanation. Focusing on the hope rather than the nagging feeling that such a thing could never be true, she hurried for the stairs that led to the great kitchens underneath the palace.
Down the winding stairs she went, and down again, deep, deep down, leaving the stark regiment of the palace for the sumptuous underworld. She could hear the crackle of the fires under the ovens and the hiss of the pots boiling on the top, the clank of their lids as they were lifted by the steam, smell the aromatic after-scent of the evening's dinner, the capons boiled in a broth of oranges, sugar, mace, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon, rich and powerful, intermingling with the strong notes of the strawberries soaked in red wine and ginger.
Her senses were overwhelmed, so much so that she was not wholly aware that she heard no human voices. Only when she bounded excitedly from the stairs into the vast brick vault did she see it was empty. The light from the candles danced up the orange-red walls and sent shadows rippling along the roof.
The remnants of the dinner's preparation were still scattered across the great oak tables that ran along the centre of the kitchen, juices dribbling from the edges onto the flags. The cooking pots were piled high, still unwashed.
Grace's shoulders grew taut. The kitchens should not be empty at that time; indeed, they ought to be an industrious hive of activity. The kitchen master would have his staff working hard to clear everything away so that all would be left clean and ready for the breakfast.