A/N: Spoilers for Season 2, and a good working knowledge of the show would probably benefit a reading of this story. This fic is very much a speculative 'what if', considering how one decision could change the events of Anne Boleyn's fall, so for now will retread the familiar ground of Season 2's final episodes, but from a slightly different angle. It takes place entirely in the Showtime Tudors universe, and makes no claim on history.

All the dialogue is taken directly from episodes 2.07 and 2.08.

Full Fathom Five

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that does fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong,

Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.

'The Tempest'

William Shakespeare

1. Intervention

She could trace its origins back to a moment of frantic bargaining played out against the nimbus of a bank of candlelight. It was there, palms flat against the marble, prostrate as a bird downed by archers, that she bartered herself for the sake of him…herself, and the child that dwelt finitely in her womb.

Anything…oh God, it would be better than this…

Could it be God's Will that broke this wave across her, when it had seemed that all the tumult of the past weeks had been overlaid and muted by her newfound, unquiet peace? Katherine gone, and fragile life promising so much within her, and the way ahead - light-lined, and glorious, and redolent of possibility. There was no room for death in all of that, surely?

She only vaguely formulated the rhythms of abstract prayers in her mind, her lips still, her clasped hands merely a dutiful obeisance to the deeper ritual of her plea. She was aware of the remote movements of the chapel's blithely continuing life beyond the arch behind her, as though a tricksy and industrious echo darted fairylike among the shadows, but Anne kept her watch in solitude, her veiled head inclined beneath the vigilant eye of the Cross.

Please…please… Against the candle burn, she had plighted herself once before. Now she sought the same vow's reaffirmation, its constancy in keeping the pact: his life, her life, unto death. Nothing else. If it please you, oh Lord…to spare him… The pain of his eyes turning beyond her to another's bed mattered not, now, not when everything tilted on its precipice and Anne could look with equal clarity from joy to ruin.

When she heard the brisk footfall behind her, it took every fibre of her ringing nerves to turn around, certain as she was of what news had been brought to her...

But instead, it was Thomas Cromwell whom she saw melting into stillness from the haste of his step, her gaze staying him as though he were a cat whose prey had scented the changing wind.

Here! She almost reeled with the outrage. What homage could he possibly wish to pay, what miracles did cheats ever beg for? The preservation of his own neck, perhaps, for did he foresee the terrible potential of her Regency, and what justice she could bring to bear on the vulpine knaves who had moved against her? Here, defiling her wretched peace with his very presence, breaking the terms of her covenant with his slow, halting bow to her, his fear-sick eyes. She felt the urge to scream at him to leave her be rising inside her; the paradox of him kneeling there in a sulphurous double of her was enough to bring the bile to her throat, and she turned back to the Cross deliberately, willing herself into clarity. She could not afford to lose sight of her wits now, even while the knowledge of his presence bore down on her such that he fissured across her every determined appeal for intervention, mocking her grief with his lawyer's case to the Almighty. No doubt he argued a most beguiling justification for his own flourishing from the ashes of this calamity.

And yet…yet this was a place that forced equanimity, that humbled utterly. Try as she might to search for it, there had been no disrespect in his manner, only an answering doubt that met her own enquiring gaze. He had come with the same purpose as she, to attempt to reason with the unfathomable logic of circumstance and, perhaps, to seek some solace in the infinitude of the wisdom that she too petitioned, without success. Maybe he, with his renowned intellect, this artful raven of the court, would pluck from the silence better answers than she? Maybe a bargain could be struck here today, won on her behalf.

Go, she thought, still fierce. But no. Stay. Stay and answer for me.

When she turned again (it seemed to be only moments, but it was impossible to tell as one half-prayer breathed into another), he had already gone, her silent request left hanging unanswered in his wake.

Not without a sting of resentment, she thought back to the time of their last meeting. He had resisted her inquisition then, as now. Always, always she must stand apart from the contrivances of these men, only guessing at this shadow's, this Cromwell's intentions.

Your Majesty? Mr Secretary Cromwell is here.

She bided the time patiently before she dealt her hand, but when she did, the obsequious formality of his smile melted at the crisply pointed allusion in her tone. "Better uses…madam?" There. That small hesitation that seemed a wilful beat of disregard, gentling his contempt of her with silence.

"Yes," she said sharply. "For endowments to charitable and educational causes. Which even Wolsey did." She dropped the name of his ill-famed predecessor casually, but to deliberate effect, and she felt a murmur of satisfaction when she saw that her aim had been true. She ventured out on another prowled circuit of him, pleasuring coolly in the man's brief fumble for a response. After several seconds, he deflected with nervous delicacy.

"Madam, I am surprised to hear you question the King's policy, which your father and brother wholeheartedly support -- "

She rounded on him again, purposefully invading his personal space, and she saw the momentary tremor of his lips as he licked them, steeling himself for the next parry. "I question the policy, Mr Secretary, because I am not convinced that it is the King's."

"Madam, I -- "

"You are far too high-handed, Mr Cromwell." Her voice lashed across his, and he broke off, helpless to intercept. A pause, and then her tone softened, almost tenderly, the intimate assurance of a lover: "You ought to be careful, or I'll have you cropped at the neck." Such power to wield, the knife-point hers to turn.

He blinked at the eccentric lightness of the threat, not quite a flinch, but she caught the expression of staunched surprise in his face, a parting of his lips as he visibly tried to decipher whether or not she meant this positing of his death as a jest. It was a little triumph to butt her head against the Chancellor's obdurate defences and see him stumble, however slightly. He was layered like an artichoke, and there were times when, through spite and irritation as much as anything else, she longed to prise a fingernail beneath his surface, flay back the adamantine and reveal the vulnerable exposure of palpitating flesh underneath, the dark treasures of his heart laid bare for her perusal. After all, did she not have a claim on him, as others? The man's veins flowed with pure ice water, it was true, but it had become habit with her of late to tease out the possibility of finding the chink through which red, red rose might dye the stream.

She jerked her head in curt dismissal of him, feeling her own mouth crimping proudly with the performance of hauteur. There was still that flicker of mystification behind his eyes, as though he had laid too many snares himself not to suspect others of chicanery. Her statement had been too boldly unequivocal to trust.

Anne schooled herself to not follow his path to the door, but she was aware of him half-turning before he left, his lingering gaze on her, a question almost asked, still guessing at their fortunes that ran aligned in mutual uncertainty.

Out of the engulfing sorrow came reprieve , for the King at least. For a time, at least.

Oh my God…oh my God…oh my God, what is this? What is this? Just when my belly is doing its business I find you wenching with Mistress Seymour!

Hush…sweetheart…

Why are you doing this? Why did you have to do this?

Animal-prone, cornered by her grief, she half-knelt like a cat at bay in the tangle of the bed sheets, her fingernails still caked underneath and stained around the quick with dried blood, eyes raw with the horror that trammelled her, and it was like that, quiet in his coldness, that he came to her. His hard blue gaze was turned inward with shock, seeing nothing but his own pain.

What he came to tell her was very simple. She would have been able to tell him it herself.

"You have lost my boy." My boy. MY BOY. Clutching the pulpy mess that rushed unstoppable from between her legs…if she held the bleeding in, it would not be true… She thought that she could still feel the tiny heart beating like it was made from clockwork…

Two unspeakable graves, one for each of them, both weighing in their excruciating relentlessness on her own shoulders, strangled love and dead babies.

"I'll not speak of it. The loss is too great. But I see now that God will not grant me any male children." He seemed to find an anchorage in his anger, mastering himself against her. He was turning away, his absenting gaze vigilant, those eyes that had drank her like slaking water… "When you are up, I will speak with you."

She felt the certainty of his conviction of her like a gallows-drop. He had come not to comfort her, nor to assure himself of her health, but to condemn her from a closed book, in the blood-rank airlessness of this death chamber. And through the stark simplicity of this denunciation, he had not moved, but had stood there, looking at her, as though he saw right through her to the empty, mortified flesh of her core, the barrenness and devastation of loss that rendered her utterly without meaning or importance to him.

"It is not all my fault." Anne's voice rasped from her, distorted with the white heat of her misery. She was taken by a wild and elated conviction that she could goad him into retaliation, that this was the way to shatter that wall of ice that had formed behind his eyes and make him see her again, and she flung out her accusation like a slap, her fingers clawing instinctively in the thin cotton of her nightdress as she cried the words at his implacably turned back like the hammering fists of a petulant child. "You have no one to blame but yourself for this." She gulped air, too furious to sob. "I was distressed to see you with that wench Jane Seymour because the love I bear you is so great..." For a moment, the absoluteness of this nightmare consumed her and her voice broke, silencing her with its pain. She felt desperation contorting her mouth, the urge to weep so strong that it almost buckled her, the muscles in her stomach reflexively pinching and contracting with sobs that she could not allow to fly free. "It broke my heart to see you loved others," she whispered, and she was pleading now, in all the agony of her defiance, striking out blindly for she saw not the path ahead of her, nor how emptily her hands clutched at salvation.

He had slowed, half to the door, and she could see the taut lines of his back working as he fought to contain the weight of his own sorrow, and in that moment, in a flash, she felt and understood all the implications of him leaving her in this room, the perfect clarity of her future tottering in the balance of its fortunes like a child's top spun with a careless hand. Her choice, slain across her path.

He cut her down, across the room, his averted head turning dismissively, all the more crushing for the angle of his face she was just allowed to glimpse.

"I said, I will speak with you - when you are well."

She felt the rising cry, building in voluptuous agony, but she was falling, only falling.

tbc...