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nightdress. Over her shoulder she said, “Is this castle in England?”
    “No,” Brill said. Lambert saw him exchange glances with Culhane.
    “In France?”
    “It is not in any place on Earth,” Brill said, “although it can be entered from three places on Earth. It is outside of time.”
    She could not possibly have understood, but she said nothing, only went on staring out the window. Over her shoulder Lambert saw the exercise court, empty now, and the antimatter power generators. Two technicians crawled over them with a robot monitor. What did Anne Boleyn make of them?
    “God alone knows if I had merited death,” Anne said. Lambert saw Culhane start.
    Brill stepped forward. “Your Grace—”
    “Leave me now,” she said without turning.
    They did. Of course, she would be monitored constantly—everything from brain scans to the output of her bowels. Although she would never know this. But if suicide was in that life-defying mind, it would not be possible. If Her Holiness ever learned of the suicide of a time hostage…Lambert’s last glimpse before the door closed was of Anne Boleyn’s back, still by the window, straight as a spear as she gazed out at antimatter power generators in a building in permanent stasis.
    “Culhane, meeting in ten minutes,” Brill said. Lambert guessed the time lapse was to let the director change into working clothes. Toshio Brill had come away from the interview with Anne Boleyn somehow diminished. He even looked shorter, although shouldn’t her small stature have instead augmented his?
    Culhane stood still in the corridor outside Anne’s locked room (would she try the door?). His face was turned away from Lambert’s. Lambert said, “Culhane…you jumped a moment in there. When she said God alone knew if she had merited death.”
    “It was what she said at her trial,” Culhane said. “When the verdict was announced. Almost the exact words.”
    He still had not moved so much as a muscle of that magnificent body. Lambert said, probing, “You found her impressive, then. Despite her scrawniness, and beyond the undeniable pathos of her situation.”
    He looked at her then, his eyes blazing: Culhane, the research engine. “I found her magnificent.”
     

     
    She never smiled. That was one of the things she knew they remarked upon among themselves: She had overheard them in the walled garden. Anne Boleyn never smiles . Alone, they did not call her Queen Anne, or Her Grace, or even the Marquis of Rochford, the title Henry had conferred upon her, the only female peeress in her own right in all of England. No, they called her Anne Boleyn, as if the marriage to Henry had never happened, as if she had never borne Elizabeth. And they said she never smiled.
    What cause was there to smile, in this place that was neither life nor death?
    Anne stitched deftly at a piece of amber velvet. She was not badly treated. They had given her a servant, cloth to make dresses—she had always been clever with a needle, and the skill had not deserted her when she could afford to order any dresses she chose. They had given her books, the writing Latin but the pictures curiously flat, with no raised ink or painting. They let her go into any unlocked room in the castle, out to the gardens, into the yards. She was a holy hostage.
    When the amber velvet gown was finished, she put it on. They let her have a mirror. A lute. Writing paper and quills. Whatever she asked for, as generous as Henry had been in the early days of his passion, when he had divided her from her love Harry Percy and had kept her loving hostage to his own fancy.
    Cages came in many sizes. Many shapes. And, if what Master Culhane and the Lady Mary Lambert said was true, in many times.
    “I am not a lady,” Lady Lambert had protested. She needn’t have bothered. Of course she was not a lady—she was a commoner, like the others, and so perverted was this place that the woman sounded insulted to be called a lady. Lambert did not like