The White Princess

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For Anthony

SHERIFF HUTTON CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, AUTUMN 1485

I wish I could stop dreaming. I wish to God I could stop dreaming.

I am so tired; all I want to do is sleep. I want to sleep all the day, from dawn until twilight that every evening comes a little earlier and a little more drearily. In the daytime, all I think about is sleeping. But in the night all I do is try to stay awake.

I go to his quiet shuttered rooms to look at the candle as it gutters in the golden candlestick, burning slowly through the marked hours, though he will never see light again. The servants take a taper to a fresh candle every day at noon; each hour burns slowly away, although time means nothing to him now. Time is quite lost to him in his eternal darkness, in his eternal timelessness, though it leans so heavily on me. All day long I wait for the slow rolling in of the gray evening and the mournful tolling of the Compline bell, when I can go to the chapel and pray for his soul, though he will never again hear my whispers, nor the quiet chanting of the priests.

Then I can go to bed. But when I get to bed I dare not sleep because I cannot bear the dreams that come. I dream of him. Over and over again I dream of him.

All day I keep my face smiling like a mask, smiling, smiling, my teeth bared, my eyes bright, my skin like strained parchment, paper-thin. I keep my voice clear and mellow, I speak words that have no meaning, and sometimes, when required, I even sing. At night I fall into my bed as if I were drowning in deep water, as if I were sinking below the depths, as if the water were possessing me, taking me like a mermaid, and for a moment I feel a deep relief as if, submerged in water, my grief can drain away, as if it were the river Lethe and the currents can bring forgetfulness and wash me into the cave of sleep; but then the dreams come.

I don’t dream of his death—it would be the worst of nightmares to see him go down fighting. But I never dream of the battle, I don’t see his final charge into the very heart of Henry Tudor’s guard. I don’t see him hacking his way through. I don’t see Thomas Stanley’s army sweep down and bury him under their hooves, as he is thrown from his horse, his sword arm failing, going down under a merciless cavalry charge, shouting: “Treason! Treason! Treason!” I don’t see William Stanley raise his crown and put it on another man’s head.

I don’t dream any of this, and I thank God for that mercy at least. These are my constant daytime thoughts that I cannot escape. These are bloody daytime reveries that fill my mind while I walk and talk lightly of the unseasonal heat, of the dryness of the ground, of the poor harvest this year. But my dreams at night are more painful, far more painful than this, for then I dream that I am in his arms and he is waking me with a kiss. I dream that we are walking in a garden, planning our future. I dream that I am pregnant with his child, my rounded belly under his warm hand, and he is smiling, delighted, and I am promising him that we will have a son, the son that he needs, a son for York, a son for England, a son for the two of us. “We’ll call him Arthur,” he says. “We’ll call him Arthur, like Arthur of Camelot, we’ll call him Arthur for England.”

The pain, when I wake to find that I have been dreaming again, seems to get worse every day. I wish to God I could stop dreaming.

My dearest daughter Elizabeth,

My heart and prayers are with you, dear child; but now, of all the times in your life, you must act the part of the queen that you were born to be.

The new king, Henry Tudor, commands you to come to me at the Palace of Westminster in London and you are to bring your sisters and cousins. Note this: he has not denied his betrothal to you. I expect it to go ahead.

I know this is not what you hoped for, my dear; but Richard is dead, and that part of your life is over. Henry is the victor and our task now is to make you his wife and Queen of England.

You will obey me in one other thing also: you will smile and look joyful as a bride coming to her betrothed. A princess does not share her grief with all the world. You were born a princess and you are the heir to a long line of courageous women. Lift up your chin and smile, my dear. I am waiting for you, and I will be smiling too.

Your loving mother

Elizabeth R

Dowager Queen of England

I read this letter with some care, for my mother has never been a straightforward woman and any word from her is always freighted with levels of meaning. I can imagine her thrilling at another chance at the throne of England. She is an indomitable woman; I have seen her brought very low, but never, even when she was widowed, even when nearly mad with grief, have I seen her humbled.

I understand at once her orders to look happy, to forget that the man I love is dead and tumbled into an unmarked grave, to forge the future of my family by hammering myself into marriage with his enemy. Henry Tudor has come to England, having spent his whole life in waiting, and he has won his battle, defeated the rightful king, my lover Richard, and now I am, like England itself, part of the spoils of war. If Richard had won at Bosworth—and who would ever have dreamed that he would not?—I would have been his queen and his loving wife. But he went down under the swords of traitors, the very men who mustered and swore to fight for him; and instead I am to marry Henry and the glorious sixteen months when I was Richard’s lover, all but queen of his court, and he was the heart of my heart, will be forgotten. Indeed, I had better hope that they are forgotten. I have to forget them myself.

I read my mother’s letter, standing under the archway of the gatehouse of the great castle of Sheriff Hutton, and I turn and walk into the hall, where a fire is burning in the central stone hearth, the air warm and hazy with woodsmoke. I crumple the single page into a ball and thrust it into the heart of the glowing logs, and watch it burn. Any mention of my love for Richard and his promises to me must be destroyed like this. And I must hide other secrets too, one especially. I was raised as a talkative princess in an open court rich with intellectual inquiry, where anything could be thought, said, and written; but in the years since my father’s death, I have learned the secretive skills of a spy.

My eyes are filling with tears from the smoke of the fire, but I know that there is no point in weeping. I rub my face and go to find the children in the big chamber at the top of the west tower that serves as their schoolroom and playroom. My sixteen-year-old sister Cecily has been singing with them this morning, and I can hear their voices and the rhythmic thud of the tabor as I climb the stone stairs. When I push open the door, they break off and demand that I listen to a round they have composed. My ten-year-old sister Anne has been taught by the best masters since she was a baby, our twelve-year-old cousin Margaret can hold a tune, and her ten-year-old brother Edward has a clear soprano as sweet as a flute. I listen and then clap my hands in applause. “And now, I have news for you.”

Edward Warwick, Margaret’s little brother, lifts his heavy head from his slate. “Not for me?” he asks forlornly. “Not news for Teddy?”

“Yes, for you too, and for your sister Maggie, and Cecily and Anne. News for all of you. As you know, Henry Tudor has won the battle and is to be the new King of England.”

These are royal children; their faces are glum, but they are too well trained to say one word of regret for their fallen uncle Richard. Instead, they wait for what will come next.

“The new King Henry is going to be a good king to his loyal people,” I say, despising myself as I parrot the words that Sir Robert Willoughby said to me as he gave me my mother’s letter. “And he has summoned all of us children of the House of York to London.”

“But he’ll be king,” Cecily says flatly. “He’s going to be king.”

“Of course he’ll be king! Who else?” I stumble over the question I have inadvertently posed. “Him, of course. Anyway, he has won the crown. And he will give us back our good name and recognize us as princesses of York.”

Cecily makes a sulky face. In the last weeks before Richard the king rode out to battle, he ordered her to be married to Ralph Scrope, a next-to-nobody, to make sure that Henry Tudor could not claim her as a second choice of bride, after me. Cecily, like me, is a princess of York, and so marriage to either of us gives a man a claim to the throne. The shine was taken off me when gossip said that I was Richard’s lover, and then Richard demeaned Cecily too by condemning her to a lowly marriage. She claims now that it was never consummated, now she says that she does not regard it, that Mother will have it annulled; but presumably she is Lady Scrope, the wife of a defeated Yorkist, and when we are restored to our royal titles and become princesses again, she will have to retain his name and her humiliation, even if no one knows where Ralph Scrope is today.

“You know, I should be king,” ten-year-old Edward says, tugging at my sleeve. “I’m next, aren’t I?”

I turn to him. “No, Teddy,” I say gently. “You cannot be king. It’s true that you are a boy of the House of York and Uncle Richard once named you as his heir; but he is dead now, and the new king will be Henry Tudor.” I hear my voice quaver as I say “he is dead,” and I take a breath and try again. “Richard is dead, Edward, you know that, don’t you? You understand that King Richard is dead? And you will never be his heir now.”

He looks at me so blankly that I think he has not understood anything at all, and then his big hazel eyes fill with tears, and he turns and goes back to copying his Greek alphabet on his slate. I stare at his brown head for a moment and think that his dumb animal grief is just like mine. Except that I am ordered to talk all the time, and to smile all the day.

“He can’t understand,” Cecily says to me, keeping her voice low so his sister Maggie cannot hear. “We’ve all told him, over and over again. He’s too stupid to believe it.”

I glance at Maggie, quietly seating herself beside her brother to help him to form his letters, and I think that I must be as stupid as Edward, for I cannot believe it either. One moment Richard was marching at the head of an invincible army of the great families of England; the next they brought us the news that he had been beaten, and that three of his trusted friends had sat on their horses and watched him lead a desperate charge to his death, as if it were a sunny day at the joust, as if they were spectators and he a daring rider, and the whole thing a game that could go either way and was worth long odds.

I shake my head. If I think of him, riding alone against his enemies, riding with my glove tucked inside his breastplate against his heart, then I will start to cry; and my mother has commanded me to smile.

“So we are going to London!” I say, as if I am delighted at the prospect. “To court! And we will live with our Lady Mother at Westminster Palace again, and be with our little sisters Catherine and Bridget again.”

The two orphans of the Duke of Clarence look up at this. “But where will Teddy and me live?” Maggie asks.

“Perhaps you will live with us too,” I say cheerfully. “I expect so.”

“Hurrah!” Anne cheers, and Maggie tells Edward quietly that we will go to London, and that he can ride his pony all the way there from Yorkshire like a little knight at arms, as Cecily takes me by the elbow and draws me to one side, her fingers nipping my arm. “And what about you?” she asks. “Is the king going to marry you? Is he going to overlook what you did with Richard? Is it all to be forgotten?”

“I don’t know,” I say, pulling away. “And as far as we are concerned, nobody did anything with King Richard. You, of all people, my sister, would have seen nothing and will speak of nothing. As for Henry, I suppose whether he is going to marry me or not is the one thing that we all want to know. But only he knows the answer. Or perhaps two people: him—and that old crone, his mother, who thinks she can decide everything.”

ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD, AUTUMN 1485

The journey south is easy in the mild September weather, and I tell our escort that there is no need to hurry. It is sunny and hot and we go by short stages as the younger children are on their ponies and cannot ride more than three hours without a rest. I sit astride my horse, the chestnut hunter that Richard gave me for my own, so that I could ride beside him, and I am glad to be on the move, leaving his castle of Sheriff Hutton, where we had planned a palace to rival Greenwich, abandoning the gardens where we walked together and the hall where we danced to the best musicians, and the chapel where he took my hand and promised that he would marry me as soon as he came back from the battle. Every day I am a little more distant from the place and hope to forget my memories of it. I try to outride my dreams but I can almost hear them, cantering like constant ghosts behind us.

Edward is excited by the journey, reveling in the freedom of the Great North Road, and taking pleasure in the people who turn out all along the way to see what is left of the royal family of York. Every time our little procession halts, people come out to bless us, doffing their caps to Edward as the only remaining York heir, the only York boy, even though our house is defeated and people have heard that there is to be a new king on the throne—a Welshman that nobody knows, a stranger come in uninvited from Brittany or France or somewhere over the narrow seas. Teddy likes to pretend to be the rightful king, going to London to be crowned. He bows and waves his hand, pulls off his bonnet, and smiles when the people tumble out of their houses and shop doorways as we ride through the small towns. Although I tell him daily that we are going to the coronation of the new King Henry, he forgets it as soon as someone shouts, “À Warwick! À Warwick!”

Maggie, his sister, comes to me the night before we enter London. “Princess Elizabeth, may I speak with you?”

I smile at her. Poor little Maggie’s mother died in childbirth and Maggie has been mother and father to her brother, and the mistress of his household, almost before she was out of short clothes. Maggie’s father was George, Duke of Clarence, and he was executed in the Tower on the orders of my father, at the urging of my mother. Maggie never shows any sign of a grudge, though she wears a locket around her neck with her mother’s hair in it, and on her wrist, a little charm bracelet with a silver barrel as a memorial for her father. It is always dangerous to be close to the throne; even at twelve, she knows this. The House of York eats its own young like a nervous cat.

“What is it, Maggie?”

Her little forehead is furrowed. “I am anxious about Teddy.”

I wait. She is a devoted sister to the little boy.

“Anxious about his safety.”

“What do you fear?”

“He is the only York boy, the only heir,” she confides. “Of course there are other Yorks, the children of our aunt Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk; but Teddy is the only son left of the sons of York: your father King Edward, my father the Duke of Clarence, and our uncle King Richard. They’re all dead now.”

I register the familiar chord of pain that resonates in me at his name, as if I were a lute, strung achingly tight. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, they are all dead now.”

“From those three sons of York, there are no other sons anymore. Our Edward is the only boy left.”

She glances at me, uncertainly. Nobody knows what happened to my brothers Edward and Richard, who were last seen playing on the green before the Tower of London, waving from the window of the Garden Tower. Nobody knows for sure; but everyone thinks they are dead. What I know, I keep a close secret, and I don’t know much.

“I’m sorry,” she says awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to distress you . . .”

“It’s all right,” I say, as if to speak of the disappearance of my brothers is not pain on pain. “Do you fear that Henry Tudor will take your brother into the Tower as King Richard took both of mine? And that he won’t come out either?”

She twists her hand in her gown. “I don’t even know if I should be taking him to London,” she exclaims. “Should I try to get a ship and take him away to our aunt Margaret in Flanders? But I don’t know how. I don’t have any money to hire a ship. And I don’t know who to ask. D’you think we should do that? Get Teddy away? Aunt Margaret would guard and keep him for love of the House of York. Should we do that? Would you know how to do it?”

“King Henry won’t hurt him,” I say. “Not right now, at any rate. He might later on, when he’s established as king and secure on the throne, and people aren’t watching him and wondering how he’s going to act. But in the next few months he’ll be seeking to make friends everywhere. He’s won the battle, now he has to win the kingdom. It’s not enough to kill the previous king, he has to be acclaimed by the people and crowned. He won’t risk offending the House of York and everyone who loves us. Why, the poor man might even have to marry me to please them all!”

She smiles. “You’d make such a lovely queen! A really beautiful queen! And then I could be sure that Edward would be safe, for you could make him your ward, couldn’t you? You’d guard him, wouldn’t you? You know he’s no danger to anyone. We’d both be faithful to the Tudor line. We’d both be faithful to you.”

“If I’m ever made queen I will keep him safe,” I promise her, thinking how many lives depend on me to make Henry honor his betrothal. “But in the meantime, I think you can come to London with us and we will be safe with my mother. She’ll know what to do. She’ll have a plan ready.”

Maggie hesitates. There was bad blood between her mother Isabel and mine, and then she was raised by Richard’s wife Anne, who hated my mother as a mortal enemy. “Will she care for us?” she asks very quietly. “Will your mother be kind to Teddy? They always said she was my family’s enemy.”

“She has no quarrel with either you or with Edward,” I say reassuringly. “You are her niece and nephew. We’re all of the House of York. She will protect you as she does us.”

She is reassured, she trusts me, and I don’t remind her that my mother had two boys of her own, Edward and Richard, that she loved more than life itself; but she couldn’t keep them safe. And nobody knows where my little brothers are tonight.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1485

There is no welcome party as we ride into London, and when one or two apprentices and market women catch sight of us in the narrow streets and cheer for the children of York, our escort closes up around us, to drive us as fast as they can into the courtyard of the royal Palace of Westminster, where the heavy wooden gates close behind us. Clearly, the new king Henry wants no rivals for the hearts of the city that he is calling his own. My mother is on the entrance steps, before the great doors, waiting for us with my little sisters, six-year-old Catherine and four-year-old Bridget, on either side of her. I tumble down from my horse and find myself in her arms, smelling her familiar perfume of rosewater and the scent of her hair, and as she holds me and pats my back, I find myself suddenly in tears, sobbing for the loss of the man I loved so passionately, and the future I had planned with him.

“Hush,” my mother says firmly, and sends me indoors while she greets my sisters and my cousins. She comes in after me, with Bridget on one hip and Catherine holding her hand, Anne and Cecily dancing around her. She is laughing, and looks happy and far younger than her forty-eight years. She is wearing a gown of dark blue, a blue leather belt around her slim waist, and her hair tied back into a blue velvet cap. All the children are shouting with excitement as she draws us into her private rooms, and sits down with Bridget on her knee. “Now tell me everything!” she says. “Did you really ride all the way, Anne? That was very good indeed. Edward, my dear boy, are you tired? Was your pony good?”

Everyone speaks at once, Bridget and Catherine are jumping and trying to interrupt. Cecily and I wait for the noise to die down, and my mother smiles at the two of us as she offers the children sugared plums and small ale, and they sit before the fire to enjoy their treats.

“And how are my two big girls?” she asks. “Cecily, you have grown again, I swear you are going to be as tall as me. Elizabeth, dear, you are pale and far too thin. Are you sleeping all right? Not fasting, are you?”

“Elizabeth says she can’t be sure if Henry will marry her or not,” Cecily bursts out at once. “And if he does not, what will happen to us all? What’s going to happen to me?”

“Of course he will marry her,” my mother says calmly. “He most certainly will. His mother has spoken to me already. They realize that we have too many friends in Parliament and in the country for him to risk insulting the House of York. He has to marry Elizabeth. He promised it nearly a year ago and he’s not free to choose now. It was part of his plan of invasion and his agreement with his supporters from the very beginning.”

“But isn’t he angry about King Richard?” Cecily persists. “Richard and Elizabeth? And what she did?”

My mother turns a serene face to my spiteful sister. “I know nothing about the late usurper Richard,” she says, just as I knew she would. “And no more do you. And King Henry knows even less.”

Cecily opens her mouth as if she would argue, but one cool look from my mother silences her. “King Henry knows very little at all about his new kingdom as yet,” my mother continues smoothly. “He has spent almost all his life overseas. But we will help him and tell him all that he needs to know.”

“But Elizabeth and Richard . . .”

“That is one of the things he doesn’t need to know.”

“Oh, very well,” Cecily says crossly. “But this is about all of us, not just Elizabeth. Elizabeth isn’t the only one here, though she behaves as if nobody matters but her. And the Warwick children are always asking how they will be safe, and Maggie is afraid for Edward. And what about me? Am I married or not? What is going to happen to me?”

My mother frowns at this stream of demands. Cecily was married so quickly, just before the battle, and her bridegroom rode away before they were even bedded. Now, of course, he is missing, and the king who ordered the wedding is dead, and everything that everyone planned has failed. Cecily is perhaps a maid again, or perhaps a widow, or perhaps an abandoned wife. Nobody knows.

“Lady Margaret will make the Warwick children her wards. And she also has plans for you. She spoke most kindly of you and of all your sisters.”

“Is Lady Margaret going to command the court?” I ask quietly.

“What plans?” Cecily demands.

“I’ll tell you later, when I know more myself,” my mother says to Cecily, and to me she remarks, “She’s to be served on bended knee, she is to be called ‘Your Grace,’ she’s to receive a royal bow.”

I make a little face of disdain. “We didn’t part the best of friends, she and I.”

“When you’re married and you are queen, she will curtsey to you, whatever name she goes by,” my mother says simply. “It doesn’t matter if she likes you or not, you’re still going to marry her son.” She turns to the younger children. “Now, I’ll show you all your rooms.”

“Aren’t we in our usual rooms?” I ask thoughtlessly.

My mother’s smile is slightly strained. “Of course we’re not in the royal rooms anymore. Lady Margaret Stanley has reserved the queen’s rooms as her own. And her husband’s family, the Stanleys, have all the best apartments. We are in the second-best rooms. You are in Lady Margaret’s old room. It seems that she and I have swapped places.”

“Lady Margaret Stanley is to have the queen’s rooms?” I ask. “Didn’t she think that I would have them?”

“Not yet, at any rate,” my mother says. “Not until the day that you marry and are crowned. Until then she is the first lady of Henry’s court, and she is anxious that everyone knows it. Apparently, she has ordered everyone to call her My Lady the King’s Mother.”

“My Lady the King’s Mother?” I repeat the strange title.

“Yes,” my mother says with a wry smile. “Not bad for a woman who was my lady-in-waiting, and who has spent the last year estranged from her husband and under house arrest for treason, don’t you think?”

We move into the second-best rooms in Westminster Palace and wait for King Henry to command our presence. He does not. He holds his court at the palace of the Bishop of London, near St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City, and every man who can pretend that he is of the House of Lancaster, or a longtime secret supporter of the Tudor cause, flocks to see him and claims a reward for his loyalty. We wait for an invitation to be presented at court, but none comes.

My mother orders new dresses for me, headdresses to make me look yet taller, new slippers to peep below the hem of the new gowns, and praises my looks. I am fair like she was, with gray eyes. She was the famously beautiful daughter of the best-looking couple in the kingdom and she says with quiet satisfaction that I have inherited the family looks.

She seems serene; but people are beginning to talk. Cecily says that we may be in the royal palace again, but it is as lonely and as quiet as being mewed up in sanctuary. I don’t bother to disagree with her, but she’s wrong. She’s so very wrong. She can’t remember sanctuary as I can; there is nothing, nothing worse than the darkness and the quiet, and knowing that you can’t get out, and fearing that anyone can come in. Last time we were in sanctuary, we could not get out for nine months; it felt like nine years, and I thought I would fade and die without sunlight. Cecily says that she, as a married woman, should not even be with us, but she should be released to rejoin her husband.

“Except that you don’t know where he is,” I say. “He’s probably run away to France.”

“At least I was married,” she says pointedly. “I didn’t bed a man married to someone else. I was not a scarlet adulteress. And at least he’s not dead.”

“Ralph Scrope of Upsall,” I reply scathingly. “Mr. Nobody of Nowhere. If you can find him, if he is still alive, you can live with him, for all I care. If he’ll have you without being told to do so. If he’ll be your husband without a royal command.”

She hunches her shoulder and turns away from me. “My Lady the King’s Mother will provide for me,” she says defensively. “I am her goddaughter. It is she who matters, who commands everything now. She will remember me.”

The weather is all wrong for the time of year, too sunny, too bright, too hot during the day and humid at night, so nobody can sleep. Nobody but me. Although I am cursed by dreams, I still cannot stop myself sleeping. I drop into darkness every night and dream that Richard has come to me, laughing. He tells me that the battle went his way and we are to be married. He holds my hands as I protest that they came and told me that Henry had won, and he kisses me and calls me a fool, a little darling fool. I wake believing it to be true, and feel a sudden sick realization when I look at the walls of the second-best bedroom, and Cecily sharing my bed, and remember that my love lies dead and cold in an unmarked grave, while his country sweats in the heat.

My maid, Jennie, who comes from a family of merchants in the City, tells me that there is terrible sickness in the crowded houses of the inner city. Then she tells me that two of her father’s apprentices have fallen sick and died.

“The plague?” I ask. At once, I step back a little from her. There is no cure for the disease and I am afraid that she carries the illness with her and the hot plague wind will blow over me and my family.

“It’s worse than the plague,” she says. “It’s not like anything anyone has seen before. Will, the first apprentice, said at breakfast that he was cold and that he ached as if he had been fighting with a singlestick all the night. My father said he could go back to his bed, and then he started to sweat; his shirt was wet with sweat, he was dripping with it. When my mother took him a pot of ale he said he was burning up and couldn’t get cool. He said he would sleep and then he didn’t waken. A young man of eighteen! Dead in an afternoon!”

“His skin?” I ask. “Did he have boils?”

“No boils, no rash,” she insists. “As I say—it’s not the plague. It’s this new illness. They call it the sweating sickness, a new plague that King Henry has brought upon us. Everyone says that his reign has started with death and won’t last. He has brought death with him. We’ll all die of his ambition. They say that he came in with sweat and will labor to keep his throne. It’s a Tudor illness, he brought it in with him. He’s cursed, everyone says so. It’s autumn but it’s as hot as midsummer, and we’re all going to sweat to death.”

“You can go home,” I say nervously. “And, Jennie, stay at home until you can be sure you are well and everyone in your house is well. My mother won’t want your service if there are sick people in your house. Don’t come back to the palace until you are free of sickness. And go home without seeing my sisters or the Warwick children.”

“But I’m well!” she protests. “And it’s a fast disease. If I had it, I would be dead before I could even tell you about it. As long as I can walk to the palace from my home, I am well enough.”

“Go home,” I command. “I’ll send for you when you can come again,” and then I go to find my mother.

She is not in the palace, not in the shuttered shade of the empty queen’s rooms, not even in the cool walks of the garden, but I find her seated on a stool at the far end of the landing stage that extends out into the river to catch the breeze that whispers along the water, listening to the lapping of the waves against the wood piling.

“Daughter mine,” she greets me as I walk up to her. I kneel on the planks for her blessing, and then sit beside her with my feet dangling over the edge and my own reflection looking up at me as if I were a water goddess living under the river, waiting to be released from an enchantment, and not a spinster princess that nobody wants.

“Have you heard of this new illness in the City?” I ask her.

“Yes, for the king has decided he can’t have his coronation and risk bringing together so many people who could be sick,” she says. “Henry will have to be a conqueror and not a crowned king for a few more weeks until the sickness passes. His mother, Lady Margaret, is having special prayers said; she will be beside herself. She thinks that God has guided her son this far, but now sends a plague to try his fortitude.”

Looking up at her, I have to squint against the bright western sky, where the sun is setting in a blaze of color, promising another unseasonably hot day tomorrow. “Mother, is this your doing?”

She laughs. “Are you accusing me of witchcraft?” she asks. “Cursing a nation with a plague wind? No, I couldn’t make such a thing happen; and if I did have such a power, I wouldn’t use it. This is a sickness that came with Henry because he hired the worst men in Christendom to invade this poor country, and they brought the disease from the darkest, dirtiest jails of France. It’s not magic, it’s men carrying illness with them as they march. That’s why it started first in Wales and then came to London—it has followed his route, not by magic but by the dirt they left behind them and the women they raped on the way, poor souls. It is Henry’s convict army which has brought the sickness, though everyone is taking it as a sign that God is against him.”

“But could it be both?” I ask. “Both a sickness and a sign?”

“Without doubt it is both,” she says. “They are saying that a king whose reign starts with sweat will have to labor to keep his throne. Henry’s sickness is killing his friends and supporters as if the disease were a weapon against him and them. He is losing more allies now in his triumph than ever died on the battlefield. It would be funny if it weren’t so bitter.”

“What does it mean for us?” I ask.

She looks upstream, as if the very water of the river might float an answer to my dangling feet. “I don’t know yet,” she says thoughtfully. “I can’t tell. But if he were to take the sickness himself and die, then people would be sure to say it was the judgment of God on a usurper, and would look for a York heir to the throne.”

“And do we have one?” I ask, my voice barely audible above the lapping of the water. “A York heir?”

“Of course we do: Edward of Warwick.”

I hesitate. “Do we have another? Even closer?”

Still looking away from me she nods, imperceptibly.

“My little brother Richard?”

Again she nods, as if she does not even trust the wind with her words.

I gasp. “You have him safe, Mother? You’re sure of it? He’s alive? In England?”

She shakes her head. “I have had no news. I can say nothing for certain, and certainly nothing to you. We have to pray for the two sons of York, Prince Edward and Prince Richard, as lost boys, until someone can tell us what has become of them.” She smiles at me. “And better that I don’t tell you what I hope,” she says gently. “But who knows what the future will bring if Henry Tudor dies?”

“Can’t you wish it on him?” I whisper. “Let him die of the illness that he has brought in with him?”

She turns her head away, as if to listen to the river. “If he killed my son, then my curse is already on him,” she says flatly. “You cursed the murderer of our boys with me, remember? We asked Melusina, the goddess-ancestor of my mother’s family, to take revenge for us. D’you remember what we said?”

“Not the exact words. I remember that night.”

It was the night when my mother and I were distraught with grief and fear, imprisoned in sanctuary as my uncle Richard came and told her that both her sons, Edward and Richard, my beloved little brothers, had disappeared from their rooms in the Tower. That was the night that my mother and I wrote a curse on a piece of paper, folded it into a paper boat, lit it, and watched it flare as it floated downriver. “I don’t remember exactly what we said.”

She knows it word for word, the worst curse she has ever laid on anyone; she has it by heart. “We said: ‘Know this: that there is no justice to be had for the wrong that someone has done to us, so we come to you, our Lady Mother, and we put into your dark depths this curse: that whoever took our firstborn son from us, that you take his firstborn son from him.’ ”

She turns her glance from the river to me, her pupils darkly dilated. “Do you remember now? As we sit here by the river? The very same river?”

I nod.

“We said: ‘Our boy was taken when he was not yet a man, not yet king—though he was born to be both. So take his murderer’s son while he is yet a boy, before he is a man, before he comes to his estate. And then take his grandson too and when you take him, we will know by these deaths that this is the working of our curse and this is payment for the loss of our son.’ ”

I give a shiver at the trance my mother is weaving around us as her quiet words fall on the river like rain. “We cursed his son and his grandson.”

“He deserves it. And when his son and his grandson die and he has nothing left but girls, then we will know him for the murderer of our boy, Melusina’s boy, and we will have had our revenge.”

“That was an awful thing that we did,” I say uncertainly. “A terrible curse on the innocent heirs. A terrible thing to wish the death of two innocent boys.”

“Yes,” my mother agrees calmly. “It was. And we did it because someone did it to us. And that someone will know my pain when his son dies, and when his grandson dies and he has no one but a girl left to inherit.”

People have always whispered that my mother practices witchcraft, and indeed her own mother was tried and found guilty of the dark arts. Only she knows how much she believes, only she knows what she can do. When I was a girl, I saw her call up a storm of rain, and I watched the river rise that washed away the Duke of Buckingham’s army and his rebellion with it. I thought then that she had done it all with a whistle. She told me of a mist which she breathed out one cold night which hid my father’s army, shrouding it so that he thundered out of a cloud on the hilltop and caught his enemy by surprise and destroyed them with sword and storm.

People believe that she has unearthly powers because her mother came from the royal house of Burgundy, and they can trace their ancestry back to the water witch Melusina. Certainly we can hear Melusina singing when one of her children dies. I have heard her myself, and it’s a sound I won’t forget. It was a cool, soft call, night after night, and then my brother was not playing on Tower Green anymore, his pale face was gone from the window, and we mourned for him as a dead boy.

What powers my mother has, and what luck runs her way that she claims as her doing, is unknown, perhaps even to her. Certainly she takes her good luck and calls it magic. When I was a girl, I thought her an enchanted being with the power to summon the rivers of England; but now, as I look at the defeat of our family, the loss of her son, and the mess we are in, I think that if she does conjure magic, then she can’t do it very well.

So I am not surprised that Henry does not die, though the sickness he has brought to England takes first one Lord Mayor of London, and then his hastily elected successor, and then six aldermen die too, almost in the same month. They say that every home in the city has suffered a death, and the carts for the dead rattle down the streets every night, just as if it were a plague year, and a bad one at that.

When the illness dies out with the cold weather, Jennie my maid does not come back to work when I send for her, for she is dead too; her whole household took the sweat and died of it between Prime and Compline. No one has known such quick deaths before, and they whisper everywhere against the new king whose reign has started with a procession of death carts. It is not till the end of October that Henry decides that it is safe to call the lords and genty of the realm together to Westminster Abbey to his coronation.

Two heralds bearing the Beaufort standard, the portcullis, and a dozen guards wearing the Stanley colors, hammer on the great door of the palace to inform me that Lady Margaret Stanley of the Beaufort family, My Lady the King’s Mother, is to honor me with a visit tomorrow. My mother inclines her head at the news and says softly—as if we are too nobly bred to ever raise our voices—that we will be delighted to see Her Grace.

As soon as they are gone and the door closed behind them, we fall into a frenzy about my dress. “Dark green,” my mother says. “It has to be dark green.”

It is our only safe color. Dark blue is the royal color of mourning, but I must not, for one moment, look as if I am grieving for my royal lover and the true king of England. Dark red is the color of martyrdom, but also sometimes, contradictorily, worn by whores to make their complexions appear flawlessly white. Neither association is one we want to inspire in the stern mind of the strict Lady Margaret. She must not think that marriage to her son is a torment for me, she must forget that everyone said that I was Richard’s lover. Dark yellow would be all right—but who looks good in yellow? I don’t like purple and anyway it is too imperial a color for a humbled girl whose only hope is to marry the king. Dark green it has to be and since it is the Tudor color, this can do nothing but good.

“But I don’t have a dark green gown!” I exclaim. “There isn’t time to get one.”

“We had one made for Cecily,” my mother replies. “You’ll wear that.”

“And what am I supposed to wear?” Cecily protests mutinously. “Am I to come in an old gown? Or will I not appear at all? Is Elizabeth going to be the only one who meets her? Are the rest of us to be in hiding? D’you want me to go to bed for the day?”

“Certainly, there’s no need for you to be here,” my mother says briskly. “But Lady Margaret is your godmother, so you will wear your blue and Elizabeth can wear your green, and you will make an effort—an exceptional effort—to be pleasant to your sister during the visit. Nobody likes a bad-tempered girl, and I have no use for one.”

Cecily is furious at this, but she goes to the chest of clothes in silence and takes out her new green gown, shakes it out, and hands it to me.

“Put it on and come to my rooms,” my mother says. “We’ll have to let down the hem.”

Dressed in the gown, now hemmed and trimmed with a new thin ribbon of cloth of gold, I wait in the presence chamber of my mother’s rooms for the arrival of Lady Margaret. She comes by royal barge, now always laid on for her convenience, with the drummer beating to keep the time, and her standards fluttering brightly at prow and stern. I hear the crunching footsteps of her companions on the gravel of the garden paths, then beneath the window, and then the clatter of the metal heels of their boots on the stones of the courtyard. They throw open the double doors and she comes through the lobby and into the room.

My mother, my sisters, and I rise from our seats and curtsey to her as equals. The height of this curtsey has been difficult to decide. We offer a middling one and Lady Margaret ducks in a shallow bob. Though my mother is now known as mere Lady Grey, she was crowned Queen of England and this woman was her lady-in-waiting. Now, although Lady Margaret sails in the royal barge, her son has not yet been crowned king. Though she calls herself My Lady the King’s Mother, he has not yet had the crown of England placed on his head. He just grabbed the circlet that Richard wore on his helmet and has to wait for his coronation.

I close my eyes quickly at the thought of the gold crown on the helmet, and Richard’s smiling brown eyes looking at me through the visor.

“I would speak with Mistress Elizabeth alone,” Lady Margaret says to my mother, not troubling with any word of greeting.

“Her Grace the Princess Elizabeth of York can take you to my privy chamber,” my mother says smoothly.

I lead the way. I can feel my back under her scrutiny as I walk and at once I become conscious of myself. I fear that I am swinging my hips, or tossing my head. I open the door and go into my mother’s private room and turn to face Lady Margaret, as she seats herself without invitation in the great chair.

“You may sit,” she says, and I take a chair opposite to her and wait. My throat is dry. I swallow and hope that she does not notice.

She looks me up and down as if I am applying for a post in her household and then slowly she smiles. “You are lucky in your looks,” she says. “Your mother was always a beauty and you are very like her: fair, slender, skin like a rose petal and that wonderful hair, gold and bronze all at once. Undoubtedly you will have beautiful children. I suppose you are still proud of your looks? I suppose you are still vain?”

I say nothing, and she clears her throat and remembers the reason for her visit.

“I have come to speak with you in private, as a friend,” she says. “We parted on bad terms.”

We parted like a pair of fishwives. But I was sure then that my lover would kill her son and make me Queen of England. Now, as it turns out, her son has killed my lover and my fate is entirely in her white, heavily ringed hands.

“I regret it,” I say with simple insincerity.

“I too,” she says, which surprises me. “I am to be your mother-in-law, Elizabeth. My son will marry you, despite everything.”

There is no point in my sudden pulse of anger at the “despite everything.” We are defeated, my hopes of happiness and being a beloved Queen of England went down under the hooves of the Stanley horsemen commanded by her husband.

I bow my head. “Thank you.”

“I will be a good mother to you,” she says earnestly. “You will find, when you come to know me, that I have great love to give, that I have a talent for loyalty. I am determined to do the will of God and I am certain that God has chosen you to be my daughter-in-law, the wife of my son, and”—her voice drops to an awed whisper at the thought of my destiny, at the divine promise of the Tudor line—“the mother of my grandson.”

I bow my head again, and when I look up, I see that her face is shining; she is quite inspired.

“When I was a little girl, no more than a child myself, I was called on to give birth to Henry,” she whispers, as if in prayer. “I thought I would die from the pain, I was certain it would kill me. I knew then that, if I survived, the child and I would have a great future, the greatest future that could be. He would be King of England and I would put him on the throne.”

There is something very moving about her rapt expression, like a nun describing her vocation.

“I knew,” she says. “I knew that he was to be king. And when I met you, I knew that you were destined to bear his son.” She turns her intense gaze on me. “That is why I was hard on you, that is why I was so furious with you when I saw you straying from your path. That is why I couldn’t stand it when I saw you falling from your position, from your destiny, from your calling.”

“You think I have a calling?” I am whispering, she is so completely convincing.

“You will be the mother of the next King of England,” she declares. “The red rose and the white, a rose without a thorn. You will have a son, and we will call him Arthur of England.” She takes my hands. “This is your destiny, my daughter. I will help you.”

“Arthur.” Wonderingly, I repeat the name that Richard chose for the son he hoped to have with me.

“It is my dream,” she says.

It was our dream too. I let her hold my hands and I don’t pull away.

“God has brought us together,” she tells me earnestly. “God has brought you to me, and you are going to give me a grandson. You are going to bring peace to England, you are going to be the peace which ends the Cousins’ War. Elizabeth, you will be a peacemaker and God Himself will call you blessed.”

Amazed at her vision, I let her hold my hands in her firm grip, and I don’t disagree.

I never tell my mother what passed between me and My Lady the King’s Mother. She raises an eyebrow at my discretion but does not ask me more. “At any rate, she said nothing to make you think that she has changed her mind about the betrothal,” she confirms.

“On the contrary, she assured me that we will marry. It will go ahead. She promised to be my friend.”

My mother hides a smile. “How kind,” is all she says. “Helpful of her.”

So we wait, with some confidence, for our invitation to the coronation, expecting to be told to go to the royal wardrobe to be fitted for our gowns. Cecily, especially, is desperate for her new robes and for the chance for us all to be seen in the world as the five York princesses once more. Only when Henry has reversed the Act of Parliament that named us as bastards and our parents’ marriage as a bigamous fraud can we wear our ermine and crowns once again. Henry’s coronation will be our first chance since Richard’s death to appear to the world in our true colors as princesses of York once again.

I am confident that we will all attend his coronation; yet, still, no word comes. I am certain that he must want his future wife to watch him take the crown on his head and the scepter in his hand. Even if he has no curiosity to see me, how can he not want to demonstrate his victory before us, the previous royal family? Surely he will want me to see him at his moment of greatest glory?

I feel more like a sleeping princess in a fairy story than the woman who is promised in marriage to the new King of England. I may live in the royal palace, and sleep in one of the best rooms, I may be served with courtesy though without the bended knee that people must show to the royal family. But I live here quietly, without a court, without the usual crowd of flatterers, friends, and petitioners, without sight of the king: a princess without a crown, a betrothed without a bridegroom, a bride with no date for her wedding.

God knows that once I was well enough known as Henry’s betrothed. When he was an exiled pretender to the throne, he swore in Rennes Cathedral itself that he was King of England and I was his bride. But, of course, that was when he was mustering his army for his invasion, desperate for support from the House of York and all of our adherents. Now he has won the battle and sent his army away, perhaps he would like to be free of his promise too, as a weapon he needed then, but does not need now.

My mother has seen to it that we all have new gowns; all five of us princesses of York are exquisitely dressed. But we have nowhere to go, and no one ever sees us, and we are called not “Your Grace” as princesses, but “my lady” as if we were the bastard daughters of a bigamous marriage and my mother was not a dowager queen but the widow of a country squire. We are all no better off than Cecily, whose marriage has now been annulled but without a new husband on offer. She is not Lady Scrope but neither is she anything else. We are all girls without a name, without a family, without certainty. And girls like this have no future.

I had assumed that I would be restored as a princess, given my fortune, and married and crowned in one great ceremony at Henry’s side; but the silence tells me that he is not an eager bridegroom.

No message comes from the royal wardrobe bidding us to come and pick out our gowns for the coronation procession. The Master of the Revels does not ask if he may come to the palace to teach us our dance for the coronation dinner. All the seamstresses and tirewomen in London are working day and night on gowns and headdresses: but not for us. Nobody is sent to us from the Lord Chamberlain’s offices with instructions for the procession. We are not invited to stay in the Tower of London the night before the ceremony, as is the tradition. No horses are ordered for us to ride from the Tower to Westminster Abbey, no ruling comes as to the order of precedence on the day. Henry sends no gifts as a bridegroom should to his bride. Nothing at all comes from his mother. Where there should be bustle and business and a host of conflicting instructions from a new king and a new court anxious to look well, there is a silence that grows more and more noticeable as the days go on.

“We’re not going to be invited to the coronation,” I say flatly to my mother when I am alone with her, as she comes to say good night to me in the bedroom that I share with Cecily. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t think we are.”

“How can he not have me there at his side?”

Slowly, she goes to the window and looks out at the dark night sky and the silvery moon. “I think they don’t want a host of Yorks beside the throne, so close to the crown,” she says dryly.

“Why not?”

She takes the shutters and latches them, as if to shut out the silvery light that shines on her, giving her an unearthly radiance. “I don’t know why for sure,” she says. “But I suppose, if I was Henry’s mother, I would not want my child, a pretender, a usurper, king only by right of battle, taking his crown alongside a princess, a true-bred princess of the royal family, beloved of the people, and a beauty. Apart from anything else I would not like how it looked.”

“Why? What does he look like?” I demand.

“Ordinary.” My mother condemns him in one damning word. “He’s very, very ordinary.”

Slowly it becomes clear to us all, even to Cecily, who is frantically hopeful almost up to the last day, that the new king will be crowned alone, and that he does not want me, distractingly beautiful, the only true royal, before the altar at his side. He will not even have us, the former royal family, as witnesses when he puts his hand on my lover’s crown, the crown worn by the man I loved, and by my father before him.

No message comes from either Henry or from his mother, Lady Margaret Stanley, to confirm this decision one way or the other, and though my mother and I consider writing to Lady Margaret, neither of us can bear the humiliation of pleading with her for the chance to attend the coronation, nor to beg her to set a date for my wedding.

“Besides, if I were to attend his coronation as a dowager queen I would take precedence over her,” my mother remarks waspishly. “Perhaps that’s why we’re not invited. She has seen nothing but my back at every great event for all of her life. She has never had a view that was not obscured by my headdress and veil. She has followed me into every single room in this palace, and then she followed Anne Neville when she was her lady-in-waiting, too. She walked behind Anne at her coronation, carrying the train. Perhaps Lady Margaret is feeling that it’s her turn to be the first lady now, and she wants someone trailing along behind her.”

“What about me?” Cecily says hopefully. “I’d carry her train. I’d be happy to carry her train.”

“You will not,” my mother says shortly.

Henry Tudor stays in Lambeth Palace until his coronation, and if he should choose to glance up from his breakfast, he would see my window in Westminster Palace, just across the river from him; but presumably he does not choose to look up, he does not wonder about his unknown bride, for still he sends no word. The nights before his coronation, he moves to the Tower of London, as is the tradition. There, he will stay in the royal rooms, and every day he will walk past the door where my brothers were last seen, every day he will walk across the green where my brother had an archery target and practiced shooting his bow. Can a man do such a thing without a chill going down his spine, without glimpsing the pale face of the imprisoned boy who should have been crowned king? Does his mother not see a slight shadow on the stair, or when she kneels in the royal stall in the chapel, does she not hear a faint echo of a boyish treble saying his prayers? How can the two Tudors go up the tightly curled stone stair in the Garden Tower and not listen at the wooden door for the voices of two little boys? And if they ever listen, are they not certain to hear Edward’s quiet prayers?

“He’ll be searching,” my mother says grimly. “He’ll be questioning everyone who ever guarded them. He’ll want to know what became of the princes, and he’ll be hoping to find something, someone who can be bribed to come forward and make an accusation, or someone who can be persuaded to confess, anything so that he can point the blame at Richard. If he can show that Richard killed our princes, then he can justify taking the throne because they are dead and he can name Richard as a tyrant and a regicide. If he can prove their death, then Henry’s cause is won.”

“Mother, I would swear on my life that Richard didn’t hurt them,” I say earnestly. “I know that Richard would have told me if he had done so. You know it. You were convinced on the night when he came to you to ask if it was you who had stolen them both away, weren’t you? He didn’t know where they were, or what had become of them. He thought you might have had them. I would swear that he never knew. Actually, it tormented him that he didn’t know. At the very end, he didn’t know who to name as his heir. He was desperate to be sure.”

My mother’s gaze is hard. “Oh, I believe that Richard didn’t kill the boys. Of course I know that. I would never have released you and your sisters into his care if I had thought he could bring himself to harm his own brother’s children. But for sure, he kidnapped our Prince Edward on the road to London. He killed my brother Anthony who tried to defend him. He took Edward into the Tower and did all he could to take my younger boy Richard too. It wasn’t him who killed them in secret, but he put them where a killer could find them. He defied your father’s will and he took your brother’s throne. He might not have killed them; but they should both have been left safe in my keeping. Richard of Gloucester took Edward from me, and he would have taken my son Richard too. He took the throne, and he killed my brother Anthony and my son Richard Grey. He was a usurper and a murderer, and I will never forgive him for those crimes. I don’t need to lay others at Richard’s door, he will go to hell for these, and I will never forgive him for these.”

Miserably, I shake my head that my mother should say this of the man I love. I can’t defend him, not to her, who lost her two boys and still does not know what has become of them. “I know,” I whisper. “I know. I’m not denying that he had to act in terrible times, he did terrible things. He confessed them to his priest and he prayed for forgiveness for them. You have no idea how tortured he was by the things he had to do. But I’m certain that he didn’t order the death of my brothers.”

“Then Henry will find nothing in his search of the Tower,” she observes. “If Richard did not kill them, there will be no bodies for Henry to bring out. Perhaps they are both alive, hidden somewhere in the Tower or in the houses nearby.”

“And what would Henry do then? If he found them alive?” I am breathless at this speculation. “What would he do if someone came forward and said they had them hidden, safely hidden away, our boys, for all this long time?”

My mother’s smile is as sad and as slow as a falling tear. “Why, he’d have to kill them,” she says simply. “If he were to find my sons alive now, he would kill them at once, and blame it on Richard. If he found my sons alive, he would have to kill them, to take the throne, just as your father killed old King Henry to take the throne. Of course he would. We all know that.”

“And would he do it, do you think? Could he do such a terrible thing?”

She shrugs. “I think he would make himself do it. He would have no choice. Otherwise, he would have risked his life and his army for nothing. His mother would have spent her life plotting and even marrying for nothing. Yes, if Henry ever finds your brother Edward alive he would kill him in that moment. If he finds your brother Richard he would have to put him to death. It would be nothing more to him than continuing the work he did at Bosworth. He’d find some way of settling his conscience. He’s a young man who has lived under the shadow of the sword from the moment when he fled England as a boy of fourteen to the day when he rode home to fight for his claim. Nobody knows better than he that any claimant to the throne has to be killed at once. A king cannot let a pretender live. No king can allow a pretender to live.”

Henry’s court goes with him to the Tower, and more and more men flock to the Tudor standard now that it is triumphant. We hear, through gossip from the city streets, of the round of rewards that comes from the Tudor throne as Henry hands out the spoils of Bosworth in the days before his coronation. His mother has all her lands and wealth returned to her; she enters a greatness that she always claimed but never enjoyed before now. Her husband, Thomas, Lord Stanley, is made Earl of Derby and High Constable of England, the greatest position in the realm, as reward for his great courage in looking both ways at once, the two-faced traitor that he is. I know, for I heard him swear the oath, that he promised his loyalty, his absolute fealty, to my Richard; I saw him go down on his knees and promise his love, even offering his son as a pledge of his loyalty. He swore that his brother, his whole family, were Richard’s true men.

But that morning at Bosworth Field he and Sir William sat on their horses with their mighty armies behind him, and waited to see which way the battle would go. When they saw Richard charge into the heart of the fighting, on his own, aimed like a spear at Henry himself, the Stanleys, Lord William and Sir Thomas, acting as one, swept down on him from behind, with swords raised. They rescued Henry in that moment, and cut Richard down to the ground when he was just moments away from putting his sword through Henry Tudor’s heart.

Sir William Stanley picked up my Richard’s helmet from the mud, tore off the battle coronet, and handed the gold circlet to Henry: the most vile piece of work of a villainous day. Now, in puppyish gratitude, Henry makes Sir William his chamberlain, kisses him on both cheeks, declares that they are the new royal family. He surrounds himself with Stanleys, he cannot thank them enough. He has found his throne and his family in one triumph. He is inseparable from his mother, Margaret, and always, half a step behind her, is her devoted husband, Lord Thomas Stanley, and half a step behind him is his brother Sir William. Henry lolls in the lap of these newfound kinsmen who have put their boy on the throne and knows he is safe at last.

His uncle Jasper, who shared his exile and kept faith with the Tudor cause since Henry’s birth, is there too, rewarded for a lifetime of loyalty with his share of the spoils. He gets his title back, and his lands returned; he will have his pick of the posts of government. And he gets even more than this. Henry writes to my aunt Katherine, the widow of the traitorous Duke of Buckingham, and tells her to prepare for remarriage. Jasper is to have her and the Buckingham fortune. It seems that all the Rivers women are part of the spoils of war. She brings the letter in her hand when she comes to see my mother as we are sitting in the second-best rooms at Westminster Palace.

“Is he mad?” she asks my mother. “Was it not enough that I was married to a boy, to the young duke who hated me, but I now have to marry another enemy of our family?”

“D’you get a fee?” my mother asks dryly, since she has her own letter to show her sister. “For see, here is our news. I am to be paid a pension. Cecily is to be married to Sir John Welles, and Elizabeth is to be betrothed to the king.”

“Well, thank God for that at least!” my aunt Katherine exclaims. “You must have been anxious.”

My mother nods. “Oh, he would have reneged on his vow if he could have done. He was looking for another bride, he was trying to get out of it.”

I look up from my sewing at this, but my mother and her sister are intent on their letters, their heads together.

“When will it be? The wedding?”

“After the coronation.” My mother points to the paragraph. “Of course, he won’t want anyone to say that they are joint king and queen. He’ll want to be seen to take the throne on his own merits. He won’t want anyone saying she takes the queen’s crown on her own account. He can’t have anyone saying that he’s got the crown through her.”

“But we’ll all go to his coronation?” my aunt Katherine asks. “They’ve left it very late but—”

“Not invited,” my mother says shortly.

“It’s an insult! He must have Elizabeth there!”

My mother shrugs her shoulders. “What if they cheered for her? What if they called for us?” she says quietly. “You know how people would cheer for her, if they saw her. You know how Londoners love the House of York. What if the people saw us and called for my nephew Edward of Warwick? What if they booed the House of Tudor and called for the House of York? At his coronation? He’s not going to risk it.”

“There’ll be York kinsmen there,” Katherine points out. “Your sister-in-law Elizabeth has turned her coat, as her husband the Duke of Suffolk has changed sides again. Her son, John de la Pole, that King Richard named as his heir, has begged Henry’s pardon and so they will be there.”

My mother nods. “So they should be,” she says. “And I am sure they will serve him loyally.”

My aunt Katherine gives a short snort of laughter and my mother cannot stop her smile.

I go to find Cecily. “You’re to be married,” I say abruptly. “I heard Mother and Aunt Katherine talking.”

She turns pale. “Who to?”

I understand at once that she is afraid that she is to be humiliated again by a marriage to some lowly supporter of the Tudor invasion. “You’re all right,” I say. “Lady Margaret is standing your friend. She’s marrying you to her half brother, Sir John Welles.”

She gives a shuddering sob and turns to me. “Oh, Lizzie, I was so afraid . . . I’ve been so afraid . . .”

I put my arm around her shoulders. “I know.”

“And there was nothing I could do. And when Father was alive, they all used to call me Princess of Scotland, as I was to marry the Scots king! Then to be pushed down to be Lady Scrope! And then to have no name at all! Oh, Lizzie, I’ve been vile to you.”

“To everyone,” I remind her.

“I know! I know!”

“But now you’ll be a viscountess!” I say. “And no doubt better. Lady Margaret favors her family above everyone else, and Henry owes Sir John a debt of gratitude for his support. They’ll give him another title and lands. You’ll be rich, you’ll be noble, you’ll be allied to My Lady the King’s Mother, you’ll be—what?—her half sister-in-law, and kinswoman to the Stanley family.”

“Anything for our sisters? What about our cousin Margaret?”

“Nothing yet. Thomas Grey, Mother’s boy, is to come home later.”

Cecily sighs. Our half brother has been like a father to us, fiercely loyal for all of our lives. He came into sanctuary with us, only breaking out to try to free our brothers in a secret attack on the Tower, serving at Henry’s court in exile, trying to maintain our alliance with him, and spying for us all the while. When Mother became sure that Henry was an enemy to fear, she sent for Thomas to come home, but Henry captured him as he was leaving. Since then, he has been imprisoned in France. “He’s pardoned? The king has forgiven him?”

“I think everyone knows he did nothing wrong. He was a hostage to ensure our alliance, Henry left him as a pledge with the French king, but now that Tudor sees that we’re obedient, he can release Thomas and repay the French.”

“And what about you?” Cecily demands.

“Apparently, Henry’s going to marry me, because he can’t get out of it. But he’s in no sort of hurry. Apparently, everyone knows that he has been trying to renege.”

She looks at me with sympathy. “It’s an insult,” she says.

“It is,” I agree. “But I only want to be his queen; I don’t want him as a man, so I don’t care that he doesn’t want me as his wife.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, 30 OCTOBER 1485

I watch from my bedroom window as the coronation barge goes down the river to the Tower, escorted by dozens of ships. I can hear the music ringing across the water. The royal barge has been regilded since we last sailed in it, and shines brightly golden on the cold water, while at prow and stern the flags of the Tudor red dragon and the Beaufort portcullis flap in triumph. Henry himself is a tiny figure. At this distance I can see only his long gown of purple velvet trimmed with ermine. He is standing so that everyone on the riverbanks can see him, arms akimbo, on the raised deck at the back of the barge. I shade my eyes and stare at him. This is the first time I have seen the man I am to marry, and at this distance he is no bigger than the tip of my little finger. The barge glides by, carrying my betrothed husband to his coronation without me, and he does not even know that I am watching him. He will not imagine that I put my little finger against the pane of thick glass to measure him, and then I snap my fingers with contempt.

The rowers are all in livery of green and white, the Tudor colors, the oars painted white with bright green blades. Henry Tudor has commanded springtime colors in autumn; it seems that nothing in England is good enough for this young invader. Though the leaves fall from the trees like brown tears, for him everything must be as green as fresh grass, as white as May blossom, as if to convince us all that the seasons are upside down and we are all Tudors now.

A second barge carries My Lady the King’s Mother, seated in her triumph on a high chair, almost a throne, so that everyone can see Lady Margaret sailing into her own at last. Her husband stands beside her chair, one proprietorial hand on the gilded back, loyal to this king as he swore he was loyal to the previous one, and the one before that. His motto, his laughable motto, is “Sans changer,” which means “always unchanged,” but the only way the Stanleys never change is their unending fidelity to themselves.

The next barge carries Jasper Tudor, the king’s uncle, who will carry the crown at the coronation. My aunt Katherine, the prize for his victory, stands beside him, her hand resting lightly on his arm. She does not look up at our windows, though she will guess we are watching. She looks straight ahead, steady as an archer, as she goes to witness the crowning of our enemy, her beautiful face quite impassive. She was married once before for the convenience of her family, to a young man who hated her; she is accustomed to grandeur abroad and humiliation at home. It has been the price she has paid for a lifetime of being one of the beautiful Rivers girls, always so close to the throne that it has bruised her like a wound.

My mother puts her arm around my waist, watching the procession with me. She says nothing, but I know that she is thinking of the day that we stood in sanctuary in the dark crypt below the abbey chapel, watching the royal barges go down the river, when they crowned my uncle Richard and passed over the true heir, my brother Edward. I thought then that we would all die in the darkness and solitude. I thought that an executioner would come for us silently one night. I thought I might wake briefly with the weight of a pillow on my face. I thought that I would never see sunshine again. I was a young woman then, and I thought that sorrow as deep as mine could only lead to death. I was grieving for my father and frightened by the absence of my brothers, and I thought that soon I would die too.

I realize that this is the third victorious coronation barge to sail past my mother. When I was just a little girl and my brother Edward was not even born, she had to hide in sanctuary as my father the king was driven out of England. They brought back the old king and my mother stooped to look out of the low dirty window of the crypt under Westminster Abbey church to see Lady Margaret and her son Henry sail down the river in their pomp to celebrate the victory of the restored King Henry of Lancaster.

I was only a little girl then, and so I don’t remember the ships sailing by nor the triumphant mother and her little son on a barge decked with red roses; but I do remember the pervasive scent of river water and damp. I do remember crying myself to sleep at night, utterly bewildered as to why we were suddenly living like poor people, hiding in a crypt under the chapel instead of enjoying the most beautiful palaces of the kingdom.

“This is the third time you have seen Lady Margaret sail by in triumph,” I remark to my mother. “Once when King Henry was restored and she led the race to get to his court and introduce her son, once when her husband was high in Richard’s favor and she carried Queen Anne’s train at the coronation, and look, now she sails by you again.”

“Yes,” she acknowledges. I see her gray eyes narrow as she watches the gloriously gilded barge and the proud flap of the standards. “But I always find her so very . . . unconvincing, even in her greatest triumphs,” she says.

“Unconvincing?” I repeat the odd word.

“She always looks to me like a woman who has been badly treated,” my mother says, and she laughs joyously out loud, as if defeat is just a turn of the wheel of fortune and Lady Margaret is not on the rise and an instrument of the glorious will of God as she thinks, but has just been lucky on this turn, and is almost certain to fall on the next. “She always looks to me like a woman who has much to complain about,” my mother explains. “And women like that are always badly treated.”

She turns to look at me, and laughs aloud at my puzzled expression. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “At any rate, we have her word that Henry will marry you, as soon as he is crowned, and then we’ll have a York girl on the throne.”

“He shows few signs of wanting to marry me,” I say dryly. “I am hardly honored in the coronation procession. It’s not us on the royal barge.”

“Oh, he’ll have to,” she says confidently. “Whether he likes it or not. The Parliament will demand it of him. He won the battle, but they won’t accept him as king without you at his side. He has had to promise. They’ve spoken to Thomas, Lord Stanley, and he, of all men, understands the way that power lies. Lord Stanley has spoken to his wife, she has spoken to her son. They all know that Henry has to marry you, like it or not.”

“And what if I don’t like it?” I turn to her and put my hands on her shoulders so she cannot glide away from my anger. “What if I don’t want an unwilling bridegroom, a pretender to the crown, who won his throne through disloyalty and betrayal? What if I tell you that my heart is in an unmarked grave somewhere in Leicester?”

She does not flinch, but confronts my angry grief, her face serene. “Daughter mine, you have known for all your life that you would be married for the good of the country and the advancement of your family. You will do your duty like a princess, wherever your heart is buried, whoever you want or don’t want, and I expect you to look happy as you do it.”

“You’ll marry me to a man that I wish were dead?”

Her smile does not waver. “Elizabeth, you know as well as I do that it is rare that a young woman can marry for love.”

“You did,” I accuse.

“I had the sense to fall in love with the King of England.”

“So did I!” breaks from me like a cry.

She nods and puts her hand gently on the nape of my neck, and when I yield to her, she pulls my head to her shoulder. “I know, I know, my love. Richard was unlucky that day, and he had never been unlucky before. You would have thought he was certain to win. I thought he was certain to win. I too staked my hopes and my happiness on his winning.”

“Do I really have to marry Henry?”

“Yes, you do. You will be Queen of England and return our family to greatness. You will restore peace to England. These are great things to achieve. You should be glad. Or, at the very least, you can look glad.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1485

Henry’s first Parliament is busy in their work, reversing the laws of Richard, pulling his signature from the statute books just as they pulled the coronet from his helmet. First they lift all the attainders of treason that were sworn against Tudor supporters, declaring themselves splendidly innocent and faithful only to their country’s interest. My uncle the Duke of Suffolk and his sons John and Edmund de la Pole all become faithful Tudors and are no longer Yorkists, though their mother, Elizabeth, is a daughter of the House of York and sister to my Richard and to my late father. My half brother Thomas Grey, who was left in France as a hostage, is to be ransomed and brought home. The king is going to overlook the suspicions he felt as a pretender. Thomas writes a pleading letter saying that he never meant to appear as if he was trying to escape from Henry’s ragbag pretender court, he was just returning to England at my mother’s bidding. And Henry, confident in his new power, is prepared to forget the momentary betrayal.

They restore Henry’s mother to her family fortune and properties; nothing is more important than building the wealth of this most powerful king’s mother. Then they promise to pay my mother’s pension as a dowager queen. They also agree that Richard’s law that ruled my mother and father were never legally married must be dismissed as a slander. More than that, it must be forgotten, and nobody is ever to repeat it. At a stroke of the pen from the Tudor Parliament, we are restored to our family name and I and all my sisters are legitimate princesses of York once more. Cecily’s first marriage is forgotten; it is as if it never was. She is Princess Cecily of York once again and free to be married to Lady Margaret’s kinsman. In Westminster Palace, the servants now bend their knee to present a dish, and everyone calls each of us “Your Grace.”

Cecily delights in our sudden restoration to our titles, all of us York princesses are glad to be ourselves once again; but I find my mother walking in silence by the cold river, her hood over her head, her cold hands clasped in her muff, her gray eyes on the gray water. “Lady Mother, what is it?” I go to take her hands and look into her pale face.

“He thinks my boys are dead,” she whispers.

I look down and see the mud on her boots and on the hem of her gown. She has been walking beside the river for an hour at least, whispering to the rippling water.

“Come inside, you’re freezing,” I say.

She lets me take her hand and lead her up the graveled path to the garden door, and help her up the stone stairs to her privy chamber.

“Henry must have certain proof that both my boys are dead.”

I take off her cloak and press her into a chair beside the fire. My sisters are out, walking to the houses of the silk merchants, gold in their purses, servants to carry their purchases home, served on bended knee, laughing at their restoration. Only my mother and I struggle here, locked in grief. I kneel before her and feel the dry rushes under my knees release their cold perfume. I take her icy hands in mine. Our heads are so close together that no one, not even someone listening at the door, could hear our whispered conversation.

“Lady Mother,” I say quietly. “How do you know?”

She bows her head as if she has been struck hard in the heart. “He must do. He must be absolutely sure that they are both dead.”

“Were you still hoping for your son Edward, even now?”

A little gesture, like that of a wounded animal, tells me that she has never stopped hoping that her eldest York son had somehow escaped from the Tower and still lived, somewhere, against the odds.

“Really?”

“I thought I would know,” she says very quietly. “In my heart. I thought that if my boy Edward had been killed I would have known in that moment. I thought that his spirit could not have left this world and not touched me as he went. You know, Elizabeth, I love him so much.”

“But, Mother, we both heard the singing that night, the singing that comes when one of our house is dying.”

She nods. “We did. But still I kept on hoping.”

There is a little silence between us, as we observe the death of her hope.

“D’you think Henry has made a search and found the bodies?”

She shakes her head. She’s certain of this. “No. For if he had the bodies, he would show them to the world and give them a great funeral for everyone to know they’re gone. If he had the bodies, he would give them a royal burial. He’d have us all draped in darkest blue, in mourning for months. If he had any firm evidence, he would use it to blacken Richard’s name. If he had anyone he could accuse of murder, he would put him on trial and publicly hang him. The best thing in the world for Henry would have been to find two bodies. He will have been praying ever since he landed in England that he would find them dead and buried, so that his claim to the throne was secure, so that nobody could ever rise up and impersonate them. The only person in England who wants to know more urgently than me where my sons are tonight is Henry the new king.

“So he can’t have found their bodies, but he must be certain that they are dead. Someone must have promised him that they were killed. Someone that he must trust. Because he would never have restored the royal title to our family if he thought we had a surviving boy. He would never have made you girls princesses of York if he thought that somewhere there was also a living prince.”

“So he’s been assured that both Edward and Richard are dead?”

“He must be sure. Otherwise, he would never have ruled that your father and I were married. The act that makes you a princess of York again makes your brothers princess of York. If our Edward is dead, then your younger brother is King Richard IV of England, and Henry is a usurper. Henry would never have restored a royal title to a live rival. He must be sure that both the boys are dead. Someone must have sworn to him that the murder was truly done. Someone must have told him, without doubt, that they killed two boys and saw them dead.”

“Could it be his mother?” I whisper.

“She’s the only one with reason to kill them, who was here when they disappeared, who is alive now,” my mother says. “Henry was in exile, his uncle Jasper with him. Henry’s ally the Duke of Buckingham might have done it; but he’s dead, so we’ll never know. If someone has reassured Henry, just now, that he is safe, then it must be his mother. The two of them must have convinced themselves that they are safe. They think both York princes are dead. Next, he will propose marriage to you.”

“He has waited till he is certain that my two little brothers are dead before he names me princess and offers me marriage?” I ask. The taste in my mouth is as bitter as my question.

My mother shrugs. “Of course. What else could he do? This is the way of the world.”

My mother is right. Early one wintry evening, a troop of the king’s newly appointed yeomen of the guard, smart in their scarlet livery, march up to the door of Westminster Palace and a herald delivers the message that King Henry will have the pleasure of visiting me within the hour.

“Run,” my mother says, taking in this letter with one swift glance. “Bess!”—to the new maid-in-waiting. “Go with Her Grace and fetch my new headdress, and her new green gown, and tell the boy to bring hot water to her room and the bath at once! Cecily! Anne! You get dressed too, and get your sisters dressed and get the Warwick children to go to the schoolroom and tell their schoolmaster to keep them there until I send for them. The Warwick children are not to come downstairs while the king is here. Make sure they understand that.”

“I’ll wear a hood, my black hood,” I say stubbornly.

“My new headdress!” she exclaims. “My jeweled headdress! You are to be Queen of England, why look like his housekeeper? Why look like his mother? As dull as a nun?”

“Because that’s what he must like,” I say quickly. “Don’t you see? He’ll like girls who are as dull as nuns. He was never at our court, he never saw the fine dresses and the beautiful women. He never saw the dances and the gowns and the glamour of our court. He was stuck like a poor boy in Brittany with maidservants and housekeepers. He lived in one poor inn after another. And then he comes to England and spends all the time with his mother, who dresses like a nun and is as ugly as sin. I have to look modest, not grand.”

My mother snaps her fingers in exasperation at herself. “Fool that I am! Quite right! Right! So go!” She gives me a little push in the back. “Go, and hurry!” I hear her laugh. “Be as plain as you can! If you can manage not to be the most beautiful girl in England, that would be excellent!”

I run as she bids me, and the lad who brings the firewood rolls the great wooden bath into my bedroom and labors up the stairs with the heavy jugs of hot water to hand over at the door. I have to wash in a hurry as the maid brings in the jugs and fills up the bath, and then I dry and twist my damp hair up under my black gable hood, which sits heavily on my forehead, two great wings either side of my ears. I step into my linen and my green gown, and Bess darts around me threading the laces through the holes to fasten the bodice until I am trussed like a chicken, I slip on my shoes and turn to her, and she smiles at me and says: “Beautiful. You are so beautiful, Your Grace.”

I take up the hand mirror and see my face reflected dimly in the beaten silver. I am flushed from the heat of the bath and I look well, my face oval, my eyes deep gray. I try a little smile and see my lips curve upwards, an empty expression without any glimmer of happiness. Richard told me I was the most beautiful girl that had ever been born, that one glance from me set him on fire with desire, that my skin was perfect, that my hair was his delight, that he never slept so well as with his face buried in my blond plait. I don’t expect to hear such words of love ever again. I don’t expect to feel beautiful ever again. They buried my joy and my girl’s vanity with my lover, and I don’t expect to feel either ever again.

The bedroom door bursts open. “He’s here,” Anne says breathlessly. “Riding into the courtyard with about forty men. Mother says come at once.”

“Are the Warwick children upstairs in the schoolroom?”

She nods. “They know not to come down.”

And so I walk down the stairs, my head steady as if wearing a crown instead of the heavy hood, my green gown brushing aside the scented rushes, as they throw open the double doors and Henry Tudor, the conqueror of England, newly crowned king, the murderer of my happiness, walks into the great hall below me.

My first thought is relief; he is less of a man than I expected. All these years of knowing that there was a pretender to the throne waiting for his chance to invade turned him into a thing of terror, a beast, larger than life. They said that he was guarded by a giant of a man at Bosworth, and I had imagined him as a giant also. But the man who comes into the hall is slight of build, tall but spare, a man of nearly thirty, energy in his walk but strain in his face, brown hair, and narrow brown eyes. For the first time it strikes me that it must be hard to spend your life in exile and finally win your kingdom by a thread, by the action of a turncoat in battle, and to know that most of the country does not celebrate your luck, and the woman that you have to marry is in love with someone else: your dead enemy and the rightful king. I have been thinking of him as triumphant; but here I see a man burdened by an odd twist of fate, coming to victory by a sneaking disloyalty, on a hot day in August, uncertain even now, if God is with him.

I pause on the stairs, my hands on the cold marble balustrade, leaning over to look down on him. His reddish-brown hair is thinning slightly on the top of his head; I can see it from my vantage point as he takes off his hat and bows low over my mother’s hand, and he comes up and smiles at her without warmth. His face is guarded, which is understandable, as he is coming to the home of a most unreliable ally. Sometimes my Lady Mother was supporting his plan against Richard, and sometimes she was against him. She sent her own son Thomas Grey to his court as his supporter but then called him home again, suspecting Henry of killing our prince. I imagine he never knew whether she was friend or enemy; of course he mistrusts her. He must mistrust all of us duplicitous princesses. He must fear my dishonesty, my infidelity, worst of all.

He kisses my mother’s fingertips as lightly as he can, as if he expects nothing but sham appearances from her, perhaps from everyone. Then he straightens up and follows her upward glance, and sees me, standing above him, on the stairs.

He knows at once who I am, and my nod of acknowledgment tells him that I recognize in him the man that I am to marry. We look more like two strangers agreeing to undertake an uncomfortable expedition together than lovers greeting. Until four months ago I was the lover of his enemy and praying three times daily for Tudor’s defeat. As recently as yesterday he was taking advice to see if he could avoid his betrothal to me. Last night, I was dreaming that he did not exist and woke wishing that it was the day before Bosworth and that he would invade only to face defeat and death. But he won at Bosworth, and now he cannot escape from his oath to marry me and I cannot escape from my mother’s promise that I shall marry him.

I come slowly down the stairs as we take the measure of each other, as if to see the truth of a long-imagined enemy. It is extraordinary to me to think that whether I like it or not, I shall have to marry him, bed him, bear his children, and live with him for the rest of my life. I shall call him husband, he will be my master, I will be his wife and his chattel. I will never escape his power over me until his death. Coldly, I wonder if I will spend the rest of my life, daily wishing for his death.

“Good day, Your Grace,” I say quietly, and I come down the last steps and curtsey and give him my hand.

He bows to kiss my fingers, and then draws me to him and kisses me on one cheek and then another, like a French courtier, pretty manners that mean nothing. His scent is clean, pleasant, I can smell the fresh winter countryside in his hair. He steps back, and I see his brown guarded eyes, and his tentative smile.

“Good day, Princess Elizabeth,” he says. “I am glad to meet you at last.”

“You will take a glass of wine?” my mother offers.

“Thank you,” he says; but he does not shift his gaze from my face, as if he is judging me.

“This way,” my mother says equably and leads the way to a private chamber off the great hall, where there is a decanter of Venetian glass and matching wine goblets for the three of us. The king seats himself on a chair but rudely gives no permission to us, and so we have to remain standing before him. My mother pours the wine and serves him first. He raises a glass to me and drinks as if he were in a taproom, but does not make a toast. He seems content to sit in silence, thoughtfully regarding me as I stand like a child before him.

“My other daughters.” My mother introduces them serenely. It takes an awful lot to shake my mother—this is a woman who has slept through a regicide—and she nods to the doorway. Cecily and Anne come in with Bridget and Catherine behind them. They all four curtsey very low. I can’t stop myself smiling at Bridget’s dignified sinking and rising. She is only a little girl, but she is no less than a duchess already in her grand manners. She looks at me reprovingly; she is a most serious five-year-old.

“I am glad to meet you all,” the new king says generally, not bothering to get to his feet. “And you are comfortable here? You have everything you need?”

“I thank you, yes,” my mother says, as if she did not once own all of England, and this was her favorite palace and run exactly as she commanded.

“Your allowance will be paid every quarter,” he says to her. “My Lady Mother is making the arrangements.”

“Please give my best wishes to Lady Margaret,” my mother says. “Her friendship has sustained me recently, and her service was very dear to me in the past.”

“Ah,” he says, as if he doesn’t much relish being reminded that his mother was my mother’s lady-in-waiting. “And your son Thomas Grey will be released from France and can come home to you,” he goes on, dispensing his goods.

“I thank you. And please tell your mother that Cecily, her goddaughter, is well,” my mother pursues. “And grateful to you and your mother for your care of her forthcoming marriage.” Cecily drops a little extra curtsey to demonstrate to the king which one of us she is, and he gives a bored nod. She looks up as if she longs to remind him that she is only waiting for him to name her wedding day, and until he does so she is still neither widow nor maid. But he gives her no opportunity to speak.

“My advisors inform me that the people are eager to see Princess Elizabeth married,” he says.

My mother inclines her head.

“I wanted to assure myself that you are well and happy,” he says directly to me. “And that you consent.”

Startled, I look up. I am not well, and I am far from happy; I am deep in grief for the man I love, the man killed by this new king and buried without honor. This man sitting before me now, asking so courteously that I consent, allowed his men to strip Richard of his armor, and then of his linen, and tie his naked body across the saddle of his horse and trot it home. They told me that they let Richard’s dead lolling head knock, in passing, against the wooden beam of the Bow Bridge as they brought him in to Leicester. That clunk, the noise of dead skull against post, sounds through my days, echoes in my dreams. Then they exposed his naked broken body on the chancel steps of the church so that everyone knew he was completely and utterly dead, and that any chance of England’s happiness under the House of York was completely and utterly over.

“My daughter is well and happy, and is your most obedient servant,” my mother says pleasantly, in the little silence.

“And what motto shall you choose?” he asks. “When you are my wife?”

I begin to wonder if he has come only to torment me. I have not thought of this. Why on earth would I have thought of my wifely motto? “Oh, do you have a preference?” I ask him, my voice coldly uninterested. “For I have none.”

“My Lady Mother suggested ‘humble and penitent,’ ” he says.

Cecily snorts with laughter, turns it into a cough, and looks away, blushing. My mother and I exchange one horrified glance, but we both know we can say nothing.

“As you wish.” I manage to sound indifferent, and I am glad of this. If nothing else, I can pretend that I don’t care.

“Humble and penitent, then,” he says, quietly to himself, as if he is pleased, and now I am sure that he is laughing at us.

Next day my mother comes to me, smiling. “Now I understand why we were honored with a royal visit yesterday,” she says. “The speaker of the House of Parliament himself stepped down from his chair and begged the king, in the name of the whole house, to marry you. The commons and the lords told him that they must have the issue resolved. The people will not stand for him as king without you at his side. They put such a petition to him that he could not deny them. They promised me this, but I wasn’t sure they would dare to go through with it. Everyone is so afraid of him; but they want a York girl on the throne and the Cousins’ War concluded by a marriage of the cousins more than anything in the world. Nobody can feel certain that peace has come with Henry Tudor unless you’re on the throne too. They don’t see him as anything more than a lucky pretender. They told him they want him to be a king grafted onto the Plantagenets, this sturdy vine.”

“He can’t have liked that.”

“He was furious,” she says gleefully. “But there was nothing he could do. He has to have you as his wife.”

“Humble and penitent,” I remind her sourly.

“Humble and penitent it is,” my mother confirms cheerfully. She looks at my downcast face and laughs. “They’re just words,” she reminds me. “Words that he can force you to say now. But in return we make him marry you and we make you Queen of England, and then it really doesn’t matter what your motto is.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, DECEMBER 1485

Again the royal herald comes to the door with the news that the king proposes the pleasure of a visit with us. But this time he intends to dine, and about twenty of his court will come with him. My mother commands the groom of the servery, the groom of the kitchens, and the groom of the ewery to present themselves to her with a menu of dishes and wines that can be prepared and served this very day, and sets them to work. She has commanded banquets with scores of dishes served to hundreds of people when she was queen in this very palace and my father the most beloved King of England. She takes a pleasure in being able to show Henry, a man who spent fifteen years hanging on the fringes of the little court of Brittany, exiled from England and in fear of his life, how a truly great palace should be run.

The firewood boy toils up the stairs with another bath, and the Warwick children are banished to their rooms and told not to come downstairs, nor even to be seen at the windows.

“Why not?” Margaret asks me, slipping into my room behind the maids carrying an armful of warm linen and a bottle of rosewater for me to rinse my hair. “Does your lady mother think that Teddy is not quick enough to meet the king?” She flushes. “Is she ashamed of us?”

“Mother doesn’t want the king distracted by the sight of a York boy,” I say shortly. “It’s nothing to do with you, or Edward. Henry knows about you both, of course, you can be sure that his mother, in her careful audit of everything that England holds, has not forgotten you. She has made you her wards; but you’re safer out of sight.”

She pales. “You don’t think the king would take Teddy away?”

“No,” I say. “But there’s no need for them to dine together. It’s better if we don’t throw them together, surely. Besides, if Teddy tells Henry that he is expecting to be king, it would be awkward.”

She gives a little laugh. “I wish no one had ever told him that he was next in line for the throne,” she says. “He took it so much to heart.”

“He’s better out of the way until Henry is accustomed to everything,” I say. “And Teddy is a darling, but he can’t be trusted not to speak out.”

She glances around at the preparations for my bath, and the laying out of my new gown, brought from the City this very day by the dressmaker, in Tudor green with love knots at the shoulders. “Do you mind very much, Elizabeth?”

I shrug my shoulders, denying my own pain. “I am a princess of York,” I say. “I have to do this, I would always have had to marry someone to suit my father’s plans. I was betrothed in the cradle. I have no choice; but I never expected to have a choice—except once, and that feels like an enchanted time now, like a dream. When your time comes, you will have to marry where you are ordered too.”

“Does it make you sad?” she asks, she is such a dear serious girl.

I shake my head. “I feel nothing,” I tell her the truth. “That’s perhaps the worst thing. I don’t feel anything at all.”

Henry’s court arrives on time, handsomely dressed, with shy half-hidden smiles. Half of his court is composed of old friends of ours; most of us are related by marriage if not by blood. There are many things left unsaid as the lords come in and greet us, just as they used to do when we were the royal family, entertaining them here, at the palace.

My cousin John de la Pole, who Richard named as his heir before Bosworth, is there with his mother, my aunt Elizabeth. She and all her family are now loyal Tudors and greet us with careful smiles.

My other aunt, Katherine, now carries the name of Tudor, and walks on the arm of the king’s uncle Jasper; but she curtseys to my mother as low as she always did, and rises up to kiss her warmly.

My uncle Edward Woodville, my mother’s own brother, is among the Tudor court, an honored and trusted friend of the new king. He has been with Henry since he went into exile, and he fought in his army at Bosworth. He bows low over my mother’s hand, then kisses her on both cheeks as her brother, and I hear his whisper: “Good to see you back in your rightful place, Lizzie-Your-Grace!”

Mother has arranged an impressive feast with twenty-two courses, and after everyone has eaten and the plates and the trestle tables have been cleared away, my sisters Cecily and Anne dance before the court.

“Please, Princess Elizabeth, dance for us,” the king says briefly to me.

I look to my mother; we had agreed that I would not dance. Last time I danced in these rooms it was the Christmas feast and I was wearing a dress of silk as rich as Queen Anne’s own, made to the same pattern as the queen’s, as if to force a comparison between her and me—her junior by ten years; and her husband the king, Richard, could not take his eyes off me. The whole court knew that he was falling in love with me and that he would leave his old sick wife to be with me. I danced with my sisters, but he saw only me. I danced before hundreds of people, but only for him.

“If you please,” Henry says, and I meet his straight hazel gaze and see that I can make no excuse.

I rise from my seat and put out my hand to Cecily, who will have to be my partner, whether she likes it or not, and the musicians strike up a saltarello. Cecily has danced with me many times before King Richard, and I can see by the sharp twist of her mouth that she is thinking of that too. She may feel like a slave having to amuse a sultan but, in this instance, I am the one most humiliated—and this is a comfort to her. It’s a fast dance, with a hop or a skip at the end of each step, and we are both quick-footed and graceful. We whirl round the room, partnering each other and then dance off to other partners and meet back again in the center. The musicians end with a flourish and we curtsey to the king and to each other and go back to stand beside my mother, a little rosy and damp and breathless, as the musicians take to the floor and play for the king.

He listens with attention, one hand tapping out the rhythm on the arm of his chair. Clearly he has a love of music and when they close with a flourish, he rewards them with a piece of gold, an adequate reward; but far from princely. Watching him, I understand that he is as careful with money as his mother—this is not a young man raised to think that the world owed him a throne. This is not a young man accustomed to a king’s fortune who spends it gladly. Not a man like my Richard, who understood that a nobleman must live like a lord and spread his good fortune among his people. Then they play for general dancing and the king leans to my mother and says that he would like some time with me, alone.

“Of course, Your Grace.” She is about to walk away from us and take the girls with her, leaving us on our own at the end of the great hall.

“Alone and undisturbed.” He stops her with a gesture of his hand. “In a private room.”

She hesitates, and I can almost see her calculating. Firstly, he is the king. Secondly, we are betrothed; and then finally her decision: he cannot, in any case, be refused. “You can be quite alone in the private chamber behind the great table,” she says. “I will see that you are not disturbed.”

He nods and rises to his feet. The musicians stop playing, the court sweeps down into a hundred bows and then rises up avidly to watch us as King Henry holds out his hand to me and, with my mother leading the way, escorts me from the raised dais and the great table where we took our dinner, through the arched doorway at the back of the great hall, into the private rooms. Everyone is rapt as we leave the court and the dancing. At the door to the chamber, my mother steps back and with a small shrug lets us go in, and it is as if we were playactors stepping off a stage into private life, into life without a playscript.

Once inside the room, he closes the door. Outside, I can hear the musicians start up again, the sound muffled through the thick wood. As if it were a matter of course, he turns the great key in the lock.

“What?” I say, startled from good manners. “What d’you think you are doing?”

He turns towards me and puts his hand firmly around my waist, locking me to his side with an irresistible grip. “We are going to become better acquainted,” he says.

I don’t shrink back from him like a fearful maid. I stand my ground. “I should like to go back to the hall.”

He sits on a chair as big as a throne, and pulls me down so I am perched uncomfortably on his knee, as if he were a drunk and I a doxy in a tavern, and he had just paid for me. “No. I told you. We are going to become better acquainted.”

I try to pull away from him, but he holds me firmly. If I struggle or fight with him I will be raising my hand against the King of England, and that is an act of treason. “Your Grace . . .” I say.

“It seems that we have to be married,” he says, a harder note coming into his voice. “I am honored by the interest that Parliament takes in the matter. Your family still has many friends, it seems. Even among those who profess to be my friends. I understand from them that you are insisting on the wedding. I’m flattered, thank you for the attention. As we both know, we have been betrothed for two long years. So now we are going to consummate our betrothal.”

“What?”

He sighs as if I am wearisomely stupid. “We are going to consummate our betrothal.”

“I will not,” I say flatly.

“You will have to do this on our wedding night. What is the difference now?”

“Because this is to dishonor me!” I exclaim. “You do this in my mother’s rooms, with my sisters just a footstep through that door, in my mother’s own palace, before our wedding, to dishonor me!”

His smile is cold. “I don’t think you have much honor to defend, do you, Elizabeth? And please—don’t be afraid that I will discover that you are not a virgin. I have lost count of the number of people who wrote to me, especially to tell me that you were King Richard’s lover. And those who took the trouble to come all the way from England just to say that they saw you walking hand in hand with him in the gardens, that he came to your rooms every night, that you were his wife’s lady-in-waiting but you spent all your time in his bed. And there were many who said that she died of poison and that it was you who passed her the physic in the glass. Your mother’s Italian powders were courteously served to yet another victim. The Rivers flow sweetly over yet another obstacle.”

I am so horrified I can hardly speak. “I never,” I swear. “I never would have hurt Queen Anne.”

He shrugs his shoulders as if it does not matter whether or not I am a murderess and a regicide. “Oh, who cares now? I daresay we have both done things we would rather not remember. She’s dead, and he’s dead, your brothers are dead, and you are betrothed to me.”

“My brothers!” I exclaim, suddenly intent.

“Dead. There is no one left but us.”

“How do you know this?”

“I know it. Here, lean closer.”

“You speak of my dead brothers and you want to shame me?” I can hardly speak, I am choking with emotion.

He leans back and laughs as if he is genuinely amused. “Really! How could I shame a girl like you? Your reputation precedes you by miles. You are utterly shamed already. I have thought of you for this last year as little more than a murderous whore.”

I am breathless as he insults me while his hard hands hold my waist, pinning me on his bony knees, like an unwilling child in a forced caress. “You cannot desire me. You know that I don’t desire you.”

“No indeed. Not at all. I’m not very fond of spoiled meats, I don’t want another man’s leavings. I particularly don’t want a dead man’s leavings. The thought of Richard the Usurper pawing you about and you fawning on him for the crown makes me quite sick.”

“Then let me go!” I shout and pull away, but he holds me tightly down.

“No. For, as you see, I have to marry you; your witch of a mother has made sure of that. The Houses of Parliament have made sure of that. But I do insist on knowng that you’re fertile. I want to know what I’m getting. Since I am forced to marry you, I must insist on a fertile wife. We have to have a Tudor prince. It would be a waste of everything if you turned out to be barren.”

I struggle in earnest now, trying to stand, trying to pull away, trying to unwind his hard hands, pulling his fingers off my waist; but he is inescapable, his hands gripping me as if he would strangle me. “Now,” he says, a little breathlessly, “am I to force you? Or will you lift that pretty gown for me and we can get the business done and return to your mother’s dinner? Perhaps you will dance for us again? Like the slut that you are?”

For a moment I am quite frozen with horror, looking into his lean face, then, to my surprise, he suddenly snatches my wrist but releases my waist, and I jump up from his lap and stand before him. For one last moment I think of wrenching my hand free and dashing for the door and running away, but the skin on my arm is burning where he grips me, and the hardness of his expression tells me that there will be no escape, no chance of escape. I flush scarlet and the tears come to my eyes.

“Please,” I say weakly. “Please don’t make me do this.”

He almost shrugs, as if there is nothing he can do but hold my wrist as if I were a prisoner, and with his free hand he makes a small lifting gesture to the hem of my gown, my Tudor green gown.

“I will come willingly to you tonight . . .” I offer. “I will come in secret, to your rooms.”

He gives a hard condemning laugh. “Smuggled into the king’s bed for old times’ sake? So you are a whore, just as I thought. And I shall have you like a whore. Here and now.”

“My father . . .” I whisper. “You’re in his chair, my father’s chair . . .”

“Your father is dead, and your uncle was no great protector of your honor,” he says and gives a little snorting laugh as if he is genuinely amused. “Get on with it. Lift your dress and climb on me. Ride me. You’re no virgin. You know how to do it.”

He keeps tight hold of me as, slowly, I bend down and lift the hem of my gown. With his other hand, he unlaces his breeches and sits back on the chair, his legs spread, and I obey his gesture and the tug on my hand and step towards him.

One hand is still gripping my wrist as his other hand raises my daintily embroidered linen, and he makes me straddle him as if I were the whore he calls me. He pulls me down onto him, where he is sitting in the chair, and thrusts upwards no more than a dozen times. His hot breath on my face is spicy from dinner when he rears up towards me, and I close my eyes and turn my face to one side, holding my breath. I dare not think of Richard. If I think of Richard, who used to take me with such delight and whisper my name in his pleasure, then I will vomit. Mercifully, Henry groans in momentary pleasure, and I open my eyes and find that he is staring at me, his brown gaze quite blank. He has observed me like a prisoner on the rack of his desire, and he has got to his satisfaction without blinking.

“Don’t cry,” he says when I have climbed down and mopped myself with the hem on my fine linen shift. “How shall you walk out and face your mother and my court if you are crying?”

“You hurt me,” I say resentfully. I show him the red weal on my wrist, and I bend and pull down my crumpled shift and my creased new gown in the merry Tudor green.

“I am sorry for that,” he says indifferently. “I will try not to hurt you in the future. If you don’t pull away, then I won’t have to hold you so tightly.”

“In the future?”

“Your maid-in-waiting or your charming sister, or even your agreeable mother, will admit me to your rooms. I shall come to you. You won’t ever be in the king’s bed again, so don’t think of it. You can tell your sister, or whoever it is who sleeps with you, that she must bed elsewhere. I will come every night before midnight at a time of my choosing. Some nights I might be later. You’ll have to wait up. You can tell your mother that this is your wish and mine.”

“She’ll never believe me,” I say irritably, rubbing the tears from my face and nipping my lips to bring the color back to them. “She’ll never think I have summoned you for love.”

“She’ll understand that I want a fertile bride,” he says shrewdly. “She’ll understand that you are to be carrying my child on your wedding day, or there will be no wedding. I won’t be such a fool as to be forced to marry a barren bride. We have agreed on this.”

“We?” I repeat. “We don’t! I don’t agree to this! I never said I agreed to this! And my mother would never believe that I consented to be shamed by you, that we have decided this together. She’ll know at once that this is not my wish but yours, and that you forced me.”

He smiles for the first time. “Ah no, you misunderstand me. I didn’t say ‘we’ meaning you and I. I can’t imagine speaking of you and me as ‘we.’ No; I meant me and my mother.”

I stop fussing with my skirt and turn to face him, openmouthed. “Your mother agreed that you should rape me?”

He nods. “Why not?”

I stammer: “Because she said she would be my friend, because she said that she saw my destiny! Because she said that she would pray for me!”

He is quite untroubled by this, seeing no contradiction in her tenderness to me and her command that I should be raped. “Of course she thinks it is your destiny,” he says. “All this”—his gesture takes in my bruised wrist, my red eyes, my humiliation, the rawness in my groin, and the ache in my heart—“All this is God’s will, as my lady mother sees it.”

I am so horrified that I can do nothing but stare at him.

He laughs, and stands to tuck his linen shirt back into his breeches and lace up the opening. “To make a prince for a Tudor throne is an act of God,” he says. “My mother would regard it almost as a sacrament. However painful.”

Roughly, I rub the tears from my face. “Then you serve a hard God and a harder mother,” I spit at him.

He agrees. “I know. It is their determination which has brought me here. It is the only thing I can count on.”

He is as good as his word and he visits me, like a man visiting the apothecary for leeches or medicine, without fail but without pleasure, every night. My mother, tight-lipped, changes my bedroom to one nearer the privy stairs that go down to the gardens and the pier for his barge. She tells Cecily that she is to sleep with her sisters, and I am now to sleep alone. Her white-faced fury prevents any comment or questions, even from Cecily, who is wild with curiosity. My lady mother herself admits Henry by the unbolted outer door, and escorts him in icy silence to my room. She never says one word of welcome to him; she walks him to and from the door as an enemy, her head held high in scorn. She waits for him in the privy hall with one candle burning and the fire banked low. She says not one word of farewell as he leaves, but opens the door for him and locks it behind him in a silent rage. He must have a determination of iron to walk in and out of my room past my speechlessly hating mother with her gray gaze burning like branding rods into his thin back.

In my room, I am silent too, but after the first few visits he becomes more assured, pausing for a glass of wine before he goes about his business, asking me what I have been doing during the day, telling me about his own work. He starts to sit in the chair by the fireside and eat some biscuits, cheese, and fruits before unlacing his breeches and taking me. While he is sitting, looking at the flames, he speaks to me as an equal, one who might have an interest in his day. He tells me the news of the court, the many men he is forgiving and hoping to bind to his rule, and his plans for the country. Despite myself, though I start the night in furious silence, I find that I volunteer what my father did in one county or another, or what Richard had planned to do in his reign. He listens with attention and sometimes says, “Good, thank you for telling me that, I didn’t know that.”

He is awkwardly conscious that he has spent his life in exile, speaks English with a foreign accent—part Breton, part French—and he knows nothing of the country that he calls his own except what he has been taught by his devoted uncle Jasper and the tutors that he hired. He has a vivid affectionate memory of Wales from when he was a little boy and the ward of William Herbert, one of my father’s greatest friends; but everything else he knows from teachers, from his uncle Jasper, and from the confused and badly drawn maps of exiles.

He has one powerful memory that he relates like a fable, of going to the mad king’s court, when my father was the king in exile, and my mother and my sisters and I were trapped in the dark cold of sanctuary for the first time. He remembers it as the pinnacle of his childhood, when his mother was sure that they would all be restored and would be the royal family forever, and he suddenly believed her, and knew that God was guiding her to the Beaufort destiny and that she was right.

“Oh, we watched you go by on your barge,” I say, remembering. “I saw you on the sunlit river, sailing by to the court, while we were all locked up and sick of the darkness.”

He says that he knelt and was blessed by Henry VI and felt, at that brush of the royal hand on his head, that he had been touched by a saint. “He was more of a holy man than a king,” he says to me urgently, like a preacher who wants someone to believe. “You could feel it in him, he was a saint, he was like an angel.” Then he suddenly falls silent, as if remembering that this is the man who was murdered in his sleep by my own father, when the mad king was as foolish as a little child trusting to the unreliable honor of the House of York. “A saint and a martyr,” he says accusingly. “He died after he had said his prayers. He died in a state of grace. At the hand of those who were little more than heretics, traitors, regicides.”

“I suppose so,” I mutter.

Every time we speak we seem to remind each other of a conflict; our very touch smudges blood prints between us.

He is conscious that he has done a most vile thing by declaring his reign from the day before the battle that killed Richard. Everyone who fought on the side of the anointed king that day can now be named as a traitor and legally put to death. It is to set justice upside down and to start his reign as a tyrant.

“No one has ever done such a thing before,” I remark. “Even the York and Lancaster kings accepted that it was a rivalry between two houses and that a man might choose one side or the other with honor. What you have done is to name men who have done nothing worse than suffer as traitors. You make them traitors for doing nothing worse than losing. You are saying that whoever wins is in the right.”

“It looks harsh,” he concedes.

“It looks like double-dealing. How can they be named traitors when they were defending the ordained king against an invasion? It’s contrary to the law, and common sense. It must be against God’s will too.”

He smiles as if nothing matters more than that the Tudor reign is established, without question. “Oh no, it’s certainly not against the will of God. My mother is a most holy woman, and she doesn’t think so.”

“And is she to be the only judge?” I ask sharply. “Of God’s will? Of the law in England?”

“Certainly, hers is the only judgment I trust,” he replies. He smiles. “Certainly I would take her advice before yours.”

He takes a glass of wine and then he beckons me to the bed with a cheerful briskness that I begin to think hides his own discomfort at what he is doing. I lie on my back as still as a stone. I never remove my gown, I never even help him when he pulls it up out of his way. I allow him to take me without a word of protest, and I turn my face to the wall so that the first time, the very first time, that he leans down to kiss my cheek, it falls on my ear, and I ignore it as if it were the brush of a buzzing fly.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, THE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS, 1485

After three long weeks of this, I go to my mother.

“I have missed my course,” I say flatly. “I suppose that’s a sign.”

The delight in her face is answer enough. “Oh! My dear!”

“He has to marry me at once, I won’t be publicly shamed by them.”

“He’ll have no reason to delay. This is what they wanted. Fancy you being so fertile! But I was just the same and my mother was too. We are women blessed with children.”

“Yes,” I say. I can’t put any joy in my voice. “I don’t feel blessed. It’s not as if this is a baby conceived in love. Not even in wedlock.”

She ignores the bleakness in my voice, and the strain in my pale face. She draws me to her and puts her hand on my belly, which is as slim and flat as ever. “It is a blessing,” she assures me. “A new baby, perhaps a boy, perhaps a prince. It doesn’t matter that he was conceived under duress; what matters is that he grows strong and tall and that we make him our own, a rose of York on the throne of England.”

I stand quietly under her touch, like an obedient brood mare, and I know that she is right. “Will you tell him or shall I?”

At once she is planning: “You tell him,” she says. “He will be happy hearing it from you. It will be the first good news that you can bring him.” She smiles at me. “The first of many, I hope.”

I can’t smile back. “I suppose so.”

That evening he comes early, and I serve him his wine and put up my hand to him in refusal as he goes to lead me to the bed.

“I have missed my course,” I say quietly. “I may be with child.”

There is no mistaking the joy in his face. His color flushes up, he takes my hands and draws me closer to him, almost as if he would wrap his arms around me, almost as if he wants to hold me with love. “Oh, I am glad,” he says. “Very glad. Thank you for telling me, it makes my heart lighter. God bless you, Elizabeth. God bless you and the child you carry. This is great news. This is the best news.” He takes a turn to the fire and comes back to me again. “This is such good news! And you so beautiful! And so fertile!”

I nod, my face like stone.

“And d’you know if it will be a boy?” he asks.

“It is too early to know anything,” I say. “And a woman can miss her course from unhappiness or shock.”

“Then I hope you are not unhappy or shocked,” he says cheerfully, as if he wants to forget that I am heartbroken and raped. “And I hope that you have a Tudor boy in there.” He pats my belly as if we were married already, a proprietorial touch. “This means everything,” he says. “Have you told your mother?”

I shake my head, taking a small defiant pleasure in lying to him. “I saved the happy news for you first.”

“I’ll tell my mother when I get home tonight.” He is quite deaf to my grim tone. “There’s nothing I could say that would be better. She’ll turn out the priest for a Te Deum.”

“You’ll be late home,” I say. “It’s after midnight now.”

“She waits up for me,” he says. “She never sleeps before I get in.”

“Why ever not?” I say, diverted.

He has the grace to blush. “She likes to see me to my bed,” he admits. “She likes to kiss me good night.”

“She kisses you good night?” I query, thinking of the hard heart of the woman who could send her son to rape me and then wait up to kiss him good night.

“There were so many years when she couldn’t kiss me before I slept,” he says quietly. “There were so many years when she didn’t know where I slept, or even if I was safely asleep at all. She likes to mark my forehead with the sign of a cross and kiss me good night. But tonight when she comes to bless me I will tell her that you are with child and I am hoping for a son!”

“I think I am with child,” I say cautiously. “But it is early days. I can’t be sure. Don’t tell her that I said I was sure.”

“I know, I know. And you will think I have been selfish, my mind only on the Tudor house. But if you have a boy, your family is of the royal house of England and your son will be king. You are in the position you were born to hold, and the wars of the cousins are ended forever, with a wedding and a baby. This is how it should be. This is the only happy ending that there can be, for this war and this country. You will have brought us all to peace.” He looks at me as if he wants to take me in his arms and kiss me. “You have brought us to peace and a happy ending.”

I hunch my shoulder against him. “I had thought of other endings,” I say, remembering the king that I loved, who had wanted me to have his son, and who said that we would call him Arthur, in honor of Camelot, a royal heir who was not made in cold determination and bitterness, but with love in warm secret meetings.

“Even now there could be other endings,” he says cautiously, taking my hand and holding it gently. He lowers his voice as if there could be eavesdroppers in this, our most private room. “We still have enemies. They are hidden but I know they are there. And if you have a girl it’s no good to me, and all this will have been for nothing. But we will work and pray that it is a Tudor boy that you are carrying. And I will tell my mother that she can arrange our wedding. At least we know that you are fertile. Even if you fail and have a girl this time, we know that you can bear a child. And next time perhaps we’ll get a boy.”

“What would you have done if I had not conceived a child?” I ask curiously. “If you had taken me but no baby had come?” I begin to realize that this man and his mother have a plan for everything, they are always in readiness.

“Your sister,” he says shortly. “I would have married Cecily.”

I gasp in shock. “But you said she was to marry Sir John Welles?”

“Yes. But if you were barren I would still need to marry a woman who could give me a son from the House of York. It would have had to be her. I would have canceled her wedding to Sir John, and had her for my wife.”

“And would you have raped her too?” I spit, pulling my hand away. “First me and then my sister?”

He raises his shoulders and spreads out his hands, a gesture entirely French, not like an Englishman at all. “Of course. I would have had no choice. I have to know that any wife can give me a son. Even you must see that I’m not taking the throne for myself, but to make a new royal family. I am not taking a wife for myself but to make a new royal family.”

“Then we are like the poorest country people,” I say bitterly. “They only marry when a baby is on the way. They always say you only buy a heifer in calf.”

He chuckles, not at all abashed. “Do they? Then I’m an Englishman indeed.” He ties the laces at his belt and laughs. “In the end I am an English peasant! I shall tell my Lady Mother tonight and she’ll be sure to come and see you tomorrow. She has prayed for this every night that I have been doing my business here.”

“She prayed while you were raping me?” I ask him.

“It isn’t rape,” he says. “Stop saying that. You’re a fool to call it that. Since we’re betrothed, it cannot be rape. As my wife you cannot refuse me. I have a right to you, as your betrothed husband. From now, till your death, you will never be able to refuse me. There can be no rape between us, only my rights and your duty.”

He looks at me and watches the protest die on my lips.

“Your side lost at Bosworth,” he reminds me. “You are the spoils of war.”

COLDHARBOUR PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS FEAST, 1485

To celebrate the days of Christmas I am invited to visit my betrothed at his court and am taken to the finest rooms of the palace of Coldharbour, where his mother holds her court. As I enter, with my mother and two sisters walking behind me, a hush spreads through the room. A lady-in-waiting, reading from the Bible, looks up and sees me, trails off, and there is silence. Lady Margaret, seated on a chair under a canopy of state as if she were a queen crowned, looks up and calmly regards us as we come forwards.

I sweep her a curtsey; behind me I see my mother’s carefully judged sinking down and rising up again. We have practiced this most difficult movement in my mother’s rooms, trying to determine the exact level of deference. My mother has a steely dislike for Lady Margaret now, and I will never forgive her for telling her son to rape me before our wedding. Only Cecily and Anne curtsey with uncomplicated deference, as a pair of minor princesses to the king’s all-powerful mother. Cecily even rises with an ingratiating smile, since she is Lady Margaret’s goddaughter and counting on this most powerful woman’s goodwill to make sure that her wedding goes ahead. My sister does not know, and I will never tell her, that they would have taken her, as coldly as they took me, if I had failed to conceive, and she would have been raped in my place while this flint-faced woman prayed for a baby.

“You are welcome to Coldharbour,” Lady Margaret says, and I think it is well named, for it is a most miserable and unfriendly haven. “And to our capital city,” she goes on, as if we girls had not been brought up here in London while she was stuck with a small and unimportant husband in the country, her son an exile and her house utterly defeated.

My mother looks around the rooms, and notes the second-rate cloth cushions on the plain window seat, and that the best tapestry has been replaced by an inferior copy. Lady Margaret Beaufort is a most careful housekeeper, not to say mean.

“Thank you,” I say.

“I have the arrangements for the wedding all in hand,” she says. “You can come to be fitted for your gown in the royal wardrobe next week. Your sisters and your mother also. I have decided that you will all attend.”

“I am to attend my own wedding?” I ask dryly, and see her flush with annoyance.

“All your family,” she corrects me.

My mother gives her blandest smile. “And what about the York prince?” she asks.

There is a sudden silence as if a snap frost has just iced the room. “The York prince?” Lady Margaret repeats slowly, and I can hear a tremor in her hard voice. She looks at my mother in dawning horror, as if something terrible is about to be revealed. “What d’you mean? What York prince? What are you saying? What are you saying now?”

My mother blankly meets her gaze. “You have not forgotten the York prince?”

Lady Margaret has blanched white as white. I can see her grip the arms of her chair, and her fingernails are bleached with the pressure of her panic-stricken grip. I glance at my mother; she is enjoying this, like a bear leader teasing the bear with a long-handled prod.

“What d’you mean?” Lady Margaret says and her voice is sharp with fear. “You cannot be suggesting . . .” She breaks off with a little gasp, almost as if she is afraid of what she might say next. “You cannot be saying now . . .”

One of her ladies steps forwards. “Your Grace, are you unwell?”

My mother observes this with detached interest, as an alchemist might observe a transformation. The upstart king’s mother is riven with terror at the very name of a York prince. My mother enjoys the sight for a moment, then she releases her from the spell. “I mean, Edward of Warwick, the son of George, Duke of Clarence,” she says mildly.

Lady Margaret gives a shuddering sigh. “Oh, the Warwick boy,” she says. “The Warwick boy. I had forgotten the Warwick boy.”

“Who else?” my mother asks sweetly. “Who did you think I meant? Who else could I mean?”

“I had not forgotten the Warwick children.” Lady Margaret grasps for her dignity. “I have ordered robes for them too. And gowns for your younger daughters also.”

“I am so pleased,” my mother says pleasantly. “And my daughter’s coronation?”

“Will follow later,” Lady Margaret says, trying to hide that she is gasping, still recovering from her shock, gulping for her words like a landed carp. “After the wedding. When I decide.”

One of her ladies steps forwards with a glass of malmsey and she takes a sip and then another. The color comes back to her cheeks with the sweet wine. “After their wedding they will travel to show themselves to the people. A coronation will follow after the birth of an heir.”

My mother nods, as if the matter is indifferent to her. “Of course, she’s a princess born,” she remarks, quietly pleased that being a princess born is far better than being a pretender king.

“I wish any child to be born at Winchester, at the heart of the old kingdom, Arthur’s kingdom,” Lady Margaret states, struggling to regain her authority. “My son is of the house of Arthur Pendragon.”

“Really?” my mother exclaims, all sweetness. “I thought he was from a Tudor bastard out of a Valois dowager princess. And that, a secret wedding, never proved? How does that trace back to King Arthur?”

Lady Margaret pales with rage, and I want to tug my mother’s sleeve to remind her not to torment this woman. She had Lady Margaret on the run at the mention of a York prince, but we are supplicants at this new court and there is no benefit in making its greatest woman angry.

“I don’t need to explain my son’s inheritance to you, whose own marriage and title was only restored by us, after you had been named as an adulteress,” Lady Margaret says bluntly. “I have told you of the arrangements for the wedding, I will not delay you further.”

My mother keeps her head up and smiles. “And I thank you,” she says regally. “So much.”

“My son will see Princess Elizabeth.” Lady Margaret nods to a page. “Take the princess to the king’s private rooms.”

I have no choice but to go through the interconnecting room, to the king’s chambers. It seems the two of them are never more than a doorway apart. He is seated at a table that I recognize at once as one used in this palace by my lover Richard, made for my father, King Edward. It is so strange to see Henry seated in my father’s chair, signing documents on Richard’s table, as if he were king himself—until I remember that he is indeed the king himself, his pale, worried face the image that will be stamped on the coins of England.

He is dictating to a clerk with a portable writing desk slung around his neck, a quill in one hand, another tucked behind his ear, but when Henry sees me, he gives me a broad welcoming smile, waves the man away, and the guards close the door on him and we are alone.

“Are they spitting like cats on a barn roof?” He chuckles. “There’s no great love lost between them, is there?”

I’m so relieved to have an ally that for a moment I nearly respond to his warmth, then I check myself. “Your mother is ordering everything, as usual,” I say coldly.

The merry smile is wiped from his face. He frowns at the least hint of criticism of her. “You have to understand that she has waited for this moment all her life.”

“I am sure we all know this. She does tell everyone.”

“I owe her everything,” he says frostily. “I can’t hear a word against her.”

I nod. “I know. She tells everyone that too.”

He rises from his chair and comes around the table towards me. “Elizabeth, you will be her daughter-in-law. You will learn to respect her and love and value her. You know, in all the years when your father was on the throne, my mother never gave up her vision.”

I grit my teeth. “I know,” I say. “Everybody knows. She tells everyone that as well.”

“You have to admire that in her.”

I cannot bring myself to say that I admire her. “My mother too is a woman of great tenacity,” I say carefully. Privately I think: But I don’t worship her like a baby, she doesn’t speak of nothing but me as if she had nothing in her life but one spoiled brat.

“I am sure they are filled with bile now, but before that they were friends and even allies,” he reminds me. “When we are married, they will join together. They’ll both have a grandson to love.”

He pauses as if he hopes I will say something about their grandson.

Unhelpfully, I stay silent.

“You are well, Elizabeth?”

“Yes,” I say shortly.

“And your course has not returned?”

I grit my teeth at having to discuss something so intimate with him. “No.”

“That’s good, that’s so good,” he says. “That’s the most important thing!” His pride and excitement would be such a pleasure from a loving husband, but from him it grates on me. I look at him in blank enmity and keep my silence.

“Now, Elizabeth, I just wanted to tell you that our wedding day is to be the feast of St. Margaret of Hungary. My mother has it all planned, you need do nothing.”

“Except walk up the aisle and consent,” I suggest. “I suppose even your mother will concede that I have to give my consent.”

He nods. “Consent, and look happy,” he adds. “England wants to see a joyful bride, and so do I. You will please me in this, Elizabeth. It is my wish.”

St. Margaret of Hungary was a princess like me, but she lived in a convent in such poverty that she fasted to death. The choice of her day for my wedding by my mother-in-law does not escape me. “Humble and penitent.” I remind him of the motto his mother chose for me. “Humble and penitent like St. Margaret.”

He has the grace to chuckle. “You can be as humble and penitent as you like.” He smiles and looks as if he would take my hand and kiss me. “You can’t exceed in humility for us, my sweetheart.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, 18 JANUARY 1486

I am a winter bride, and the morning of my wedding day is as bitterly cold as my heart. I wake to the flowers of frost on my windows, and Bess, coming into the room, begs me to stay in bed until she has the fire banked up and my linen laid out to warm before it.

I step out of my bed and she pulls my nightgown over my head and then offers me my undergarments, all new and trimmed with white silk embroidery on the white linen at the hem, then my red satin overgown slashed at the sleeves and opening at the front to show a black silk damask undergown. Fussing, she ties the laces under the arms while the two other maids-in-waiting tie those at the back. It is a little tighter than when it was first fitted on me. My breasts have grown fuller and my waist is thickening. I notice the changes, but nobody else does yet. I am losing the body that my lover adored, the girlish litheness that he used to wrap around his battle-hardened body. Instead I will be the shape that my husband’s mother wants: a rounded fertile pear of a woman, a vessel for Tudor seed, a pot.

I stand like a child’s doll, being dressed as if I were made of lumpy straw stuffed in a sock, limp in their hands. The gown is darkly magnificent, making my hair shine golden, and my skin gleams coldly white against the rich deep fabric. The door opens and my mother comes in. She is already in her gown of cream, trimmed with green and silver and ribbons, with her hair tied loosely at the back; later she will twist it under her heavy headdress. For the first time, I notice that she has a fine scattering of gray hairs among the blond; she is a golden queen no more.

“You look lovely,” she says, kissing me. “Does he know you are wearing red and black?”

“His mother watched them fit the gown,” I say dully. “She chose the material. Of course he knows. She knows everything and she tells him.”

“They didn’t want green?”

“Lancaster red,” I say bitterly. “Martyrdom red, whore’s red, blood red.”

“Hush,” she commands. “This is your day of triumph.”

At her touch, I find my throat is tightening, and the tears that have been blurring my view all morning spill down on my cheeks. Gently, she pushes them away with the heel of her hand, one cheek and then the other. “Now stop,” she orders softly. “There is nothing that can be done but obey and smile. Sometimes we win; sometimes we lose. The main thing is that we always, we always go on.”

“We, the House of York?” I ask her skeptically. “For this wedding dissolves York into Tudor. This is no victory for us, but our final defeat.”

She smiles her secretive smile. “We, the daughters of Melusina,” she corrects me. “Your grandmother was a daughter of the water goddess of the royal house of Burgundy and she never forgot that she was both royal and magical. When I was your age, I didn’t know whether she could summon up a storm or whether it was all just luck and pretence to get her own way. But she taught me that there is nothing in the world more powerful than a woman who knows what she wants and walks a straight road towards it.

“It doesn’t matter if you call it magic or determination. It doesn’t matter if you make a spell or a plot. You have to make up your mind what you want, and have the courage to set your heart on it. You will be Queen of England, your husband is the king. Through you, the Yorks regain the throne of England that is their right. Walk through your sorrow, my daughter, it hardly matters as long as you walk to where you want to be.”

“I have lost the man I love,” I say bitterly. “And this very day I am to marry the man who killed him. I don’t think I will ever walk to where I want to be. I don’t think that place exists in England anymore, I don’t think that place exists in this world anymore.”

She could almost laugh aloud in her easy confidence. “Of course you think that now! Today you are to marry a man that you despise; but who knows what will happen tomorrow? I can’t foretell the future. You were born at the very heart of troubled times. Now you will marry one king, and perhaps you will see him challenged, and perhaps you will see him fall. Perhaps you will see Henry go down in the mud and die under the hooves of a traitor army. How can I know? No one can. But one thing I do know: today you can marry him and become Queen of England. You can make peace where he has made war. You can protect your friends and family and put a York boy on the throne. So go to your wedding with a smile.”

He is standing at the chancel steps when I come in through the west door of Westminster Abbey to a sudden shout of silver trumpets. I walk alone; one of the ironies of this wedding is that if there was a man of my family to escort me, then Henry would not be King of England and waiting for me with a shy smile on his face. But my father the king is dead, my two York uncles are dead, my little brothers Edward and Richard are missing, presumed dead. The only York boy left for sure is little Edward of Warwick, who bobs his head to me in a funny regal gesture, as if granting his permission as I walk past the chairs of state where he stands, guarded by his sister, Margaret.

Ahead of me Henry is a blaze of gold. His mother has decided to sacrifice elegance for ostentation, and he is wearing a complete suit of cloth of gold as if he is a newly minted statue, a new Croesus. She had thought he would look regal, a gilded god, and that I would look dull and dark and modest. But against his tawdry brightness my dark black and red gown glows with quiet authority. I can see his mother looking crossly from him to me, and puzzling as to why I seem royal and he looks like a mountebank.

The gown is cut very full with a lot of material gathered at the front, and so nobody can yet see that my belly is bigger. I am a full month into my time, possibly more; but only the king, his mother, and my mother know. I render a silent prayer that they have told nobody.

The archbishop is waiting for us, his prayer book open, his old face smiling down as we walk towards him to the chancel steps. He is my kinsman, Thomas Bourchier, and his hands tremble as he takes my hand and places it in Henry’s warm grip. He crowned my father nearly twenty-five years ago, and he crowned my mother, he crowned my darling Richard and his then-wife, Anne, and, if the baby I am carrying proves to be a son, then no doubt he will baptise the child Arthur and then crown me.

His round, lined face shines on me with simple goodwill as I stand before him. He would have performed my wedding service with Richard, and I would have stood here in a white gown trimmed with white roses and been married and crowned in one beautiful ceremony and been a beloved bride and a merry queen.

As his kind eyes fall on my face I can feel myself slipping into a reverie, almost fainting, as if I have entered one of my dreams, standing here at the chancel steps on my wedding day, just as I hoped I would be. In a daze, I take Henry’s hand and repeat the words that I thought I would say to another man. “I, Elizabeth, take thee, H . . . H . . . H . . .” I stumble. It is as if I cannot speak this wrong name, I cannot wake to this awkward reality.

It is awful, I cannot say another word, I cannot catch my breath, the terrible fact that I am not pledging myself to Richard has stuck in my throat. I am starting to choke, in a moment I will retch. I can feel myself sweating, I can feel myself sway, my legs weakening under me. I cannot bring myself to say the name of the wrong man, I cannot make myself promise myself to anyone but Richard. I try again. I get as far as “I, Elizabeth, take thee . . .” before I choke into silence. It is hopeless, I cannot say it. I give a little whooping cough and raise my eyes to his face. I cannot help myself, I hate him like an enemy, I cannot stop myself dreaming of his enemy, I cannot say his name, I cannot possibly marry him.

But Henry, prosaic and real, understands exactly what is happening, and gives me a sharp corrective pinch with his fingers in the soft palm of my hand. He uses his nails, he digs into my flesh, I yelp at the pain, and his hard brown gaze emerges from the mist and I see his scowl. I snatch at a gasp of air.

“Say it!” he mutters furiously.

I master myself and say again, correctly this time, “I, Elizabeth, take thee, Henry . . .”

The wedding banquet is held at Westminster Palace and I am served on bended knee as if I were a queen, though My Lady the King’s Mother mentions once or twice, as if in passing, that although I am the king’s wife, I am not yet crowned. After the feast there is dancing and a little play put on by some skilled actors. There are tumblers, music from the choristers, the king’s fool tells some bawdy jokes, and then my mother and sisters come to escort me to the bedroom.

It is warm with a long-established fire of smoldering logs and scented pinecones in the hearth, and my mother gives me a drink of specially brewed wedding ale.

“Are you nervous?” Cecily asks, her tone as sweet as mead. We still don’t have a date for her wedding day, and she is anxious that no one forget that she must come next. “I am sure that I will be nervous, on my wedding night. I shall be a nervous bride, I know, when it is my turn.”

“No,” I say shortly.

“Why don’t you help your sister into bed?” my mother suggests to her, and Cecily turns back the covers and gives me an upward push into the high bed. I settle myself against the pillows and swallow down my apprehension.

We can hear the king and his friends approaching the door. The archbishop comes in first, to sprinkle holy water and pray over the marriage bed. Behind him comes Lady Margaret, a big ivory crucifix tightly in her hands, and behind her comes Henry, looking flushed and smiling among a band of men who slap him on the back and tell him that he has won the finest trophy in all of England.

One freezing look from Lady Margaret warns everyone that there are to be no bawdy jests. The page boy turns back the covers, the king’s men in waiting take off his thick bejeweled robe, Henry in his beautifully embroidered white linen nightshirt slips between the sheets beside me, and we both sit up and sip our wedding ale like obedient children at bedtime while the archbishop finishes his prayers and steps back.

Reluctantly, the wedding guests go out, my mother gives me a quick farewell smile and shepherds my sisters away. Lady Margaret is the last to leave and as she goes to the door I see her look back at her son, as if she has to stop herself from coming back in to embrace him once more.

I remember that he told me of all the years when he went to sleep without her kiss or her blessing, and that she loves now to see him to his bed. I see her hesitating at the threshold as if she cannot bear to leave him, and I give her a smile, and I stretch out my hand and rest it lightly on her son’s shoulder, a gentle proprietorial touch. “Good night, Lady Mother,” I say. “Good night from us both.” I let her see me take her son’s fine linen collar in my fingers, the collar she embroidered herself in white-on-white embroidery, and I hold it as if it were the leash of a hunting dog who is wholly mine.

For a moment she stands watching us, her mouth a little open, drawing a breath, and as she stays there, I lean my head towards Henry as if I am going to rest it on his shoulder. He is smiling proudly, his face flushed, thinking that she is enjoying the sight of her son, her adored only son, in his wedding bed, a beautiful bride, a true princess, beside him. Only I understand that the sight of me, with his shoulder under my cheek, smiling in his bed, is eating her up with jealousy as if a wolf had hold of her belly.

Her face is twisted as she closes the door on us, and as the lock clicks shut and we hear the guardsmen ground their pikes, we both breathe out, as if we have been waiting for this moment when we are finally alone. I raise my head and take my hand from his shoulder, but he catches it and presses my fingers to his collarbone. “Don’t stop,” he says.

Something in my face alerts him to the fact that it was not a caress but a false coin. “Oh, what were you doing? Some spiteful girlish trick?”

I take my hand back. “Nothing,” I say stubbornly.

He looms towards me and for a moment I am afraid that I have angered him, and he is going to insist on confirming the marriage by bedding me, inspired by anger, wanting to give me pain for pain. But then he remembers the child that I carry, and that he may not touch me while I am pregnant, and he gets up bristling with offense, and throws his beautiful wedding robe around his shoulders and stirs the fire, draws a writing table to the chair and lights the candle. I realize that the whole day has been spoiled for him by this moment. He can declare a day ruined by the mishap of a minute and he will remember the minute and forget the day. He is always so anxious that he seeks disappointment—it confirms his pessimism. Now he will remember everything, the cathedral, the ceremony, the feasting, the moments that he enjoyed, through a veil of resentment, for the rest of his life.

“There was I, fool that I am, thinking that you were being loving to me,” he says shortly. “I thought you were touching me tenderly. I thought that our marriage vows had moved your heart. I thought that you were resting your head on my shoulder for affection. Fool that I am.”

I can make no reply. Of course I was not being loving to him. He is my enemy, the murderer of my betrothed lover. He is my rapist. How should he dream that there could ever be affection between us?

“You can sleep,” he throws over his shoulder. “I am going to look at some requests. The world is filled with people who want something from me.”

I care absolutely nothing for his ill temper. I will never allow myself to care for him, whether he is angry, or even—perhaps as now—hurt, and by me. He can comfort himself or sulk all night, just as he pleases. I pull the pillow down under my head, smooth out my nightgown across my rounded belly, and turn my back to him. Then I hear him say, “Oh! I forgot something.” He comes back to the bed and I glance over my hunched shoulder and I see, to my horror, that he has a knife in his hand, unsheathed, the firelight glinting on the bare blade.

I freeze in fear. I think, dear God, I have angered him so badly that he is going to kill me now in revenge for making him a cuckold, and what a scandal there will be, and I did not say good-bye to my mother. Then I think irrelevantly that I lent a necklace to little Margaret of Warwick to wear on my wedding day, and I should like her to know that she can keep it if I am going to die, and then finally I think—oh God, if he cuts my throat now, then I will be able to sleep without dreaming of Richard. I think perhaps there will be a sudden terrible pain and then I will dream no more. Perhaps the stab of the dagger will thrust me into Richard’s arms, and I will be with him in a sweet sleep of death together, and I will see his beloved smiling face and he will hold me and our eyes will close together. At the thought of Richard, of sharing death with Richard, I turn towards Henry and the knife in his hand.

“You’re not afraid?” he asks curiously, staring at me as if he is seeing me for the very first time. “I’m standing over you with a dagger and yet you don’t even flinch? Is it true then? What they say? That your heart is so broken that you wish for death?”

“I won’t beg for my life, if that’s what you’re hoping,” I say bitterly. “I think I’ve had my best days and I never expect to be happy again. But no, you’re wrong. I want to live. I would rather live than die and I would rather be queen than dead. But I’m not frightened of you or your knife. I’ve promised myself that I will never care for anything that you say or do. And if I were afraid, I would rather die than let you see it.”

He laughs shortly and says, as if to himself, “Stubborn as a mule, just as I warned my Lady Mother . . .” Then he says out loud, “No, this is not to cut your pretty throat but only your foot. Give me your foot.”

Unwillingly, I stretch out my foot, and he throws back the rich covers of the bed. “Seems a pity,” he says to himself. “You do have the most exquisite skin, and the arch of your instep is just kissable—it’s ridiculous that one should think of it, but any man would want to kiss just here . . .” and then he makes a quick painful slash that makes me flinch and cry out in pain.

“You hurt me!”

“Hold still,” he says, and squeezes my foot over the sheets so that two, three drops of blood fall on the whiteness, then he hands me a linen cloth. “You can bind it up. It will hardly show in the morning, it was nothing more than a scratch, and anyway you will put on stockings.”

I tie the cloth around my foot and look at him. “There’s no need to look so aggrieved,” he says. “That has saved your reputation. They’ll look at the sheets in the morning and there’s the stain that shows that you bled like a virgin on your wedding night. When your belly shows, we will say that he was a wedding-night baby, and when he is born we will say that he is an eight-month baby, come early.”

I put my hand to my belly where I can feel nothing more than a couple of handfuls of extra fat. “What would you know about an eight-month baby?” I ask. “What would you know about a show on the sheets?”

“My mother told me,” he says. “She told me to cut your foot.”

“I have so much to thank her for,” I say bitterly.

“You should do. For she told me to do this to make him into a honeymoon baby,” Henry says with grim humor. “A honeymoon baby, a blessing, and not a royal bastard.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, FEBRUARY 1486

I am the wife of the King of England, but I don’t have the queen’s apartments in Westminster Palace. “Because you’re not queen,” Henry says simply.

Mouth downturned, eyes hostile, I just look at him.

“You’re not! And besides, my mother works with me on the state papers and it is easier for us to share a private room. It’s easy if our rooms are adjoining.”

“You use the secret passage which goes from your bedroom to hers?”

He flushes. “It’s hardly secret.”

“Private, then. My father built it so that he could join my mother in her rooms without the whole court escorting him. He had it made so that he could bed her without the whole court knowing when he was going to her. They liked to be together in secret.”

His quick flush rises to his cheeks. “Elizabeth—what’s the matter with you? My mother and I often have supper together, we often talk together in the evening, we pray together,” he says. “It’s easier for us if she can come and see me or if I need to see her.”

“You like to walk in and out of each other’s rooms, night and day?” I ask again.

He pauses, irritated. I have learned to read his expressions and this tightening of his mouth and narrowing of his eyes shows me that I am embarrassing him. I love to set him on edge, it is one of the only pleasures of my marriage.

“Do I understand that you want to move into the queen’s rooms so that I can walk in and out of your bedroom night and day, without notice? Have you developed a taste for my attention? Do you want me at your bedside? In your bed? Do you want me to come to you secretly for love? For love which is not for the procreation of children but for lust? Like your parents with their secret sinful meetings?”

I drop my eyes. “No,” I say sulkily. “It’s just that it looks odd that I don’t have the queen’s rooms.”

“Is there anything wrong with the rooms you have? Are they not furnished to your liking? Are they too small?”

“No.”

“Do you need better tapestries on the walls? Are you deficient in the matter of musicians? Or servants? Are you going hungry, shall the kitchens send you more little plates?”

“It’s not that.”

“Oh, do tell me if you are starving to death? If you are lonely or chilled?”

“My rooms are quite adequate,” I say through my teeth.

“Then I suggest you let my mother stay in the apartments that she uses, which she needs as my principal advisor. And that you keep the rooms that she has allotted to you. And I will visit you every night, until I go on progress.”

“You’re going on progress?” This is the first I have heard of it.

He nods. “Not you. You’re not coming. You’re not to travel, Mother thinks it better that you should rest in London. She and I are going north. She thinks that I should be seen by as many people as possible, visit towns, spread loyalty. Confirm our supporters in their posts, befriend former enemies. The Tudors need to stamp their mark on this country.”

“Oh, she definitely won’t want me there then,” I say spitefully. “Not if it’s a Tudor progress. She won’t want a York princess. What if people preferred me to you? What if they looked past her, past you, and cheered for me?”

He rises to his feet. “I believe she was thinking of nothing but your health, and the health of our baby—as was I,” he says sharply. “And of course the kingdom has to be made loyal to the Tudor line. The child in your belly is a Tudor heir. We are doing this for you and for the child you carry. My mother is working for you and for her grandson. I wish you could find the grace to be grateful. You say you are a princess, I hear all the time that you are a princess by birth—I wish you would show it. I wish you would try to be queenly.”

I lower my eyes. “Please tell her I am grateful,” I say. “I am always, always grateful.”

My mother comes to my rooms, her face pale, a letter in her hand.

“What d’you have there? Nothing good by the looks of it.”

“It’s a proposal from King Henry that I should marry.”

I take the letter from her hands. “You?” I ask. “You? What does he mean?”

I start to scan the paper but I break off to look at her. Even her lips are white. She is nodding her head, as if she is lost for words, nodding and saying nothing.

“Marry who? Stop it, Mother. You’re frightening me. What is he thinking of? Who is he thinking of?”

“James of Scotland.” She gives a little gasp, almost a laugh. “There at the very bottom of the letter, after all the compliments and praising my youthful looks and good health. He says I am to marry the King of Scotland, and go far away to Edinburgh, and never come back.”

I turn to the page again. It is a polite letter from my husband to my mother in which he says that she will oblige him very much by meeting with the Scottish ambassador and accepting his proposal of marriage from the King of Scotland, and agree to the date, which they will suggest, for a wedding this summer.

I look at her. “He’s gone mad. He can’t command this. He can’t tell you to marry. He wouldn’t dare. This will be his mother’s plan. You can’t possibly go.”

She has a hand to her mouth to hide her trembling lips. “I imagine that I will have to go. They can make me go.”

“Mother, I can’t be here without you!”

“If he orders it?”

“I can’t live here without you!”

“I can’t bear to leave you. But if the king commands it, we’ll have no choice.”

“You can’t marry again!” I am shocked at the very thought of it. “You shouldn’t even think of it!”

She puts her hand over her eyes. “I can hardly imagine such a thing. Your father . . .” She breaks off. “Elizabeth, my dearest, I told you that you had to be a smiling bride, I told my sister Katherine that she of all people knows that women have to marry where they are bid, and I agreed to the betrothal of Cecily to Henry’s choice. I can’t pretend that I am the only one of us who must be spared. Henry won the battle. He now commands England. If he orders that I marry, even that I marry the King of Scotland, I will have to go to Scotland.”

“It’ll be his mother,” I burst out. “It’ll be his mother who wants you out of the way, not him!”

“Yes,” my mother says slowly. “It probably is her. But she has miscalculated. Not for the first time she has made a mistake in her dealings with me.”

“Why?”

“Because they will want me in Edinburgh to make sure that the Scottish king holds to the new alliance with England. They’ll want me to hold him in friendship with Henry. They’ll think that if I am queen in Scotland then James will never invade my son-in-law’s kingdom.”

“And?” I whisper.

“They’re wrong,” she says vengefully. “They’re so very wrong. The day that I am Queen of Scotland with an army to command and a husband to advise, I won’t serve Henry Tudor. I won’t persuade my husband to keep a peace treaty with Henry. If I were strong enough and could command the allies I would need, I would march against Henry Tudor myself, come south with an army of terror.”

“You would invade with the Scots?” I whisper. It is the great terror of England—a Scots invasion, an army of barbarians sweeping down from the cold lands of the North, stealing everything. “Against Henry? To put a new king on the throne of England? A York pretender?”

She does not even nod, she just widens her gray eyes.

“But what about me?” I say simply. “What about me and my baby?”

We decide that I shall try to speak with Henry. In the weeks before he goes on his progress he comes to my room and sleeps in my bed every night. This is to give weight to the claim of a honeymoon baby. He does not touch me, since to do so would be to damage the child that is growing in my broadening belly, but he takes a little supper by the fireside, and he comes into bed beside me. Mostly he is restless, disturbed by dreams. Often he spends hours of the night on his knees, and I think then that he must be tormented by the knowledge that he made war on an ordained king, overturned the laws of God, and broke my heart. In the darkness of the night his conscience speaks louder than his mother’s ambitions.

Some nights he comes in late from sitting with his mother, some nights he comes in a little drunk from laughing with his friends. He has very few friends—only those from the years of exile, men he knows that he can trust for they were there when he was a pretender and they were as desperate as him. He admires only three men: his uncle Jasper, and his new kinsmen Lord Thomas Stanley and Sir William Stanley. They are his only advisors. This night he comes in early and thoughtful, a sheaf of papers in his hands, requests from men who supported him and now want a share in the wealth of England—the barefoot exiles queuing for dead men’s shoes.

“Husband, I would talk with you.” I am sitting at the fireside in my nightgown, a red robe over my shoulders, my hair brushed loose. I have some warmed ale for him and some small meat pies.

“It’ll be about your mother,” he guesses at once disagreeably, taking in my preparations in one quick glance. “Why else would you attempt to make me comfortable? Why else would you go to the trouble to look irresistible? You know you are more beautiful than any woman I have ever seen in my life before. Whenever you wear red and spread out your hair, I know that you hope to entrap me.”

“It is about her,” I say, not at all abashed. “I don’t want her to be sent away from me. I don’t want her to go to Scotland. And I don’t want her to have to marry again. She loved my father. You never saw them together, but it was a marriage of true love, a deep love. I don’t want her to have to wed and bed another man—a man fourteen years younger than her, and our enemy . . . it’s . . . it’s . . .” I break off. “Truly, it is an awful thing to ask of her.”

He sits in the chair facing the fire and says nothing for a moment, looking at the logs that are burning down to red embers.

“I understand that you don’t want her to go,” he says quietly. “And I’m sorry for that. But half of this country still supports the House of York. Nothing has changed for them. Sometimes I think that nothing will ever change them. Defeat does not alter them, it just makes them bitter and more dangerous. They supported Richard and they won’t change sides for me. Some of them dream that your brothers are still alive, and whisper about a prince over the water. They see me as a newcomer, an invader. D’you know what they call me in the streets of York? My spies write to tell me. They call me Henry the Conqueror, as if I were William of Normandy—a foreign bastard come again. As if I am another foreign bastard. A pretender to the throne. And they hate me.”

I stir, about to make up some reassuring lie; but he holds out his hand and I put my cold hand in his and he pulls me towards him, to stand before him.

“If anyone, any man at all, stood up with a claim to the throne, and he came from the House of York, he would muster a thousand, perhaps many thousands of men,” he says. “Think of it. You could put up a dog under the banner of the white rose and they would turn out and fight to the death for it. And I would be no further on. Dog or prince, I would have the whole battle to fight all over again. It would be like invading all over again. It would be like being sleepless before the battle of Bosworth again and dreaming of the day over and over again. Except for one thing—and it is all worse: this time I would have no French army, I would have no supporters from Brittany, I would have no foreign money to hire troops, I would have no well-trained mercenaries. I would have no foolish optimism of a lad in battle for the first time. This time, I would be on my own. This time, I would have no supporters but those men who have joined my court since I won the battle.”

He sees the contempt for them in my face and he nods, agreeing with me. “I know: timeservers,” he says. “Yes, I know. Men who join the winning side. D’you think I don’t realize that they would have been Richard’s greatest friends if he had won at Bosworth? D’you think I don’t know that they would flock to whoever won a battle between me and a new pretender? D’you think I don’t know that every one of them is my friend, my dearest friend, only because I won that single battle on that particular day? D’you think I don’t count the very, very few who were with me in Brittany against the very, very many who are with me in London? D’you think I don’t know that any new pretender who beat me would be just as I am, he would do just what I have done—change the law, distribute wealth, try to make and keep loyal friends.”

“What new pretender?” I whisper, picking out the one word from his worries. At once I am frozen with fear that he has heard a rumor of a boy somewhere, hidden in Europe, perhaps writing to my mother. “What d’you mean, a new pretender?”

“Anyone,” he says harshly. “Christ Himself can’t know who is out there in hiding! I keep hearing of a boy, I keep getting whispers of a boy, but nobody can tell me where he is or what he claims to be. God knows what the people would do, if they heard just half of the stories that I have to listen to every day. John de la Pole, your cousin, may have sworn loyalty to me, but his mother is your father’s sister, and he was named as Richard’s heir—I don’t know if I can trust him. Francis Lovell—Richard’s greatest friend—is hidden away in sanctuary and nobody knows what he wants or what he plans, or who he is working with. God help me, I have moments when I even doubt your uncle Edward Woodville, and he has been in my household since Brittany. I am delaying the release of your half brother Thomas Grey because I fear that he won’t come home to England a loyal subject but just be another recruit for them—whoever they are, whoever they are waiting for. Then there is Edward Earl of Warwick, in your mother’s household, studying what exactly? Treason? I am surrounded by your family and I don’t trust any of them.”

“Edward is a child,” I say quickly, breathless with relief that at least he has no news of a York prince, no knowledge of his whereabouts, no revealing detail of his looks, his education, his claim. “And completely loyal to you, as is my mother now. We gave you our word that Teddy would never challenge you. We promised him to you. He has sworn loyalty. Of all of us, above us all, you can trust him.”

“I hope so,” he says. “I hope so.” He looks drained by his fears. “But even so—I have to do everything! I have to hold this country to peace, to secure the borders. I am trying to do a great thing here, Elizabeth. I am trying to do what your father did, to establish a new royal family, to set its stamp on the country, to lead the country to peace. Your father could never get an established peace with Scotland though he tried, just as I am trying. If your mother would go to Scotland for us, and hold them to an alliance, she would do you a service, and me a service, and her grandson would be in debt to her all his life for his safe inheritance of England. Think of that! Giving our son his kingdom with borders at peace! And she could do it!”

“I have to have her with me!” It is a wail like that of a child. “You wouldn’t send your own mother away. She has to be with you all the time! You keep her close enough!”

“She serves our house,” he says. “I am asking your mother to serve our house too. And she is a beautiful woman still, and she knows how to be queen. If she were Queen of Scotland, we would all be safer.”

He stands. He puts his hands on either side of my thickening waist and looks down into my troubled face. “Ah, Elizabeth, I would do anything for you,” he says gently. “Don’t be troubled, not when you are carrying our son. Please don’t cry. It’s bad for you. It’s bad for the baby. Please—don’t cry.”

“We don’t even know if it is a son,” I say resentfully. “You say it all the time, but it doesn’t make it so.”

He smiles. “Of course it is a boy. How could a beautiful girl like you make anything for me but a handsome firstborn son?”

“I have to have my mother with me,” I stipulate. I look up into his face and catch a glimpse of an emotion I never expected to see. His hazel eyes are warm, his mouth is tender. He looks like a man in love.

“I need her in Scotland,” he says, but his voice is soft.

“I cannot give birth without her here. She has to be with me. What if something goes wrong?”

It is my greatest card, a trump.

He hesitates. “If she is with you for the birth of our boy?”

Sulkily I nod my head. “She must be with me till he is christened. I will be happy in my confinement only if she is with me.”

He drops a kiss on the top of my head. “Ah, then I promise,” he says. “You have my word. You bend me to your will like the enchantress you are. And she can go to Scotland after the birth of your baby.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, MARCH 1486

His mother is beside herself, planning and commanding the royal progress. My mother, veteran of progresses, pageants, and visitations, observes but says nothing as My Lady the King’s Mother disappears into the royal wardrobe with tailors, seamstresses, shoemakers, and hatmakers for days at a time, trying to create a wardrobe of clothes for her son which will dazzle the Northerners into accepting him as a king. Like any usurping family, uncertain of their worth, she wants him to look every inch the part. He has to play the king; mere being is not enough. To the sly amusement of my mother and myself, Lady Margaret has only the example of my father to go on, and this leaves her utterly at a loss. My father was exceptionally tall and exceptionally handsome, and he only had to walk into a room to dominate the assembly of people. He revelled in the latest fashions and the most beautiful rich cloths and color. He was infallibly attractive to women, unable to help himself, greedy for their attention; and God knows they could not restrain their desires. A room full of women was always half in love with my father, and their husbands torn between admiration and envy. Best of all, he had my exceptionally beautiful mother always at his side and a quiverful of exquisite daughters trailing behind him. We were always a stained-glass window in motion, an icon of beauty and grace. My Lady the King’s Mother knows that we were a royal family beyond compare: regal, fruitful, beautiful, rich. She was at our court as a lady-in-waiting and she saw for herself how the country saw us, as fairy-tale monarchs. She is driving herself quite mad trying to make her awkward, paler, quieter son match up.

She solves the problem by drowning him in jewels. He never goes out without a precious brooch in his hat, or a priceless pearl at his throat. He never rides without gloves encrusted with diamonds, or a saddle with stirrups of gold. She bedecks him in ermine as if she were decorating a relic for an Easter procession; and still he looks like a young man stretched beyond his abilities, living beyond his means, ambitious and anxious all at once, his face pale against purple velvet.

“I wish you could come with me,” he says miserably one afternoon when we are in the stable yards of Westminster Palace, choosing the horses he will ride.

I am so surprised that I look twice at him to see if he is mocking me.

“You think I am joking? No. I really wish you could come with me. You’ve done this sort of thing all your life. Everyone says that you used to open the dancing at your father’s court and talk to the ambassadors. And you have been all round the country, haven’t you? You know most of the cities and towns?”

I nod. Both my father and Richard were well loved, especially in the northern counties. We rode out of London to visit the other cities of England every summer, and were greeted as if we were angels descending from heaven. Most of the great houses of every county celebrated our arrival with glorious pageants and feasts; most cities gave us purses of gold. I couldn’t count how many mayors and councillors and sheriffs have kissed my hand from when I was a little girl on my mother’s lap to when I could give a thank-you speech in faultless Latin on my own.

“I have to show myself everywhere,” he says apprehensively. “I have to inspire loyalty. I have to convince people that I will bring them peace and wealth. And I have to do all this with nothing more than a smile and wave as I ride by?”

I can’t help but laugh. “It does sound impossible,” I say. “But it’s not so bad. Remember, everyone on the roadside has come out just to see you. They want to see a great king, that’s the show they’ve turned out for. They’re expecting a smile and a wave. They are hoping for a happy lord. You just have to look the part and everyone is reassured. And remember that they have nothing else to look at—really, Henry, when you know England a little better you will see that almost nothing ever happens here. The crops fail, it rains too much in spring, it’s too dry in summer. Offer the people a well-dressed and smiling young king and you will be the most wonderful thing they have seen in many years. These are poor people without entertainment. You will be the greatest show they have ever seen—especially since your mother is exhibiting you like a holy icon, wrapped in velvet and studded with jewels.”

“It all takes so long,” he grumbles. “We have to stop at practically every house and castle on the road, to hear a loyal address.”

“Father used to say that while the speeches were going on he looked over their heads at the numbers in the crowd and worked out what they could afford to lend him,” I volunteer. “He never listened to a word that anyone was saying, he counted the cows in the fields and the servants in the yard.”

Henry is immediately interested. “Loans?”

“He always thought it was better to go straight to the people than go to Parliament for taxes, where they would argue with him as to how the country should be run, or whether he might go to war. He used to borrow from everyone that he visited. And the more passionate the speech and the more exaggerated the praise, the greater the sum of money he asked for, after dinner.”

Henry laughs and puts an arm around my broad waist and draws me to him, in the stable yard, before everyone. “And did they always lend him money?”

“Almost always,” I say. I don’t pull away but neither do I lean towards him. I let him hold me, as he has a right to do, as a husband can hold his wife. And I feel the warmth of his hand as he spreads his fingers over my belly. It’s comforting.

“I’ll do that then,” he says. “Because your father was right, it’s an expensive business trying to rule this country. Everything that I am granted in taxes from Parliament I have to give away in gifts to keep the loyalty of the lords.”

“Oh, don’t they serve you for love?” I ask nastily. I cannot stop my sharp tongue.

At once, he releases me. “I think we both know that they don’t.” He pauses. “But I doubt they loved your father that much, either.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, APRIL 1486

After weeks of preparation they are finally ready to leave. Lady Margaret is to ride out with her son for the first two days and then come back to London. If she dared, she would make the whole royal progress with him, but she is torn. She wants to be with him, she always wants to be with him, she can hardly bear to let him out of her sight; but at the same time, she cannot bear not to supervise my daily routine and keep me under constant control. She can trust no one else to order my food, to patrol my twice-daily walks, and provide me with uplifting books of sermons to read. No one but she can judge how much food or wine or ale should be served at my table, and only she can run the royal household as she wants it. It is unbearable to her that, in her absence, I might run it as I like. Or even worse—that the palace might be commanded once again by its former mistress: my mother.

Lady Margaret is so impressed with her own rule making, by the quality of her advice, that she starts to write down the orders that she gives out in my household, so that everything will always be done exactly as she has devised, for years in the future, even after her death. I imagine her, beyond the grave, still ruling the world as my daughter and my granddaughters consult the great book of the royal household, and learn that they are not to eat fresh fruit, nor to sit too close to the fire. They are to avoid overheating and not to take a chill.

“Clearly, no one has ever had a baby before,” says my mother, who had twelve.

Henry writes to his mother every other day and reports how he is greeted on the road as he makes his slow progress north, what families he meets, and what gifts he receives on the way. To me, he writes once a week, telling me where he is staying that evening, that he is in good health, and that he wishes me well. I reply with a formal note, and give my unsealed letter to his mother, who reads it before folding it in her own packet to him.

In Lent, the court fasts, eating no meat, but My Lady the King’s Mother decides that this is not a rich enough diet for me. She sends a message to the Pope himself to request that I be allowed to eat meat throughout the season, to support the growth of the baby. Nothing is more important than a Tudor son and heir, not even her famous piety.

On the death of Thomas Bourchier, Lady Margaret names her favorite and former conspirator John Morton for the post of Archbishop of Canterbury, and he is swiftly appointed. I am sorry that my old kinsman will not christen my son or put my crown on my head. But John Morton is like a well-bred hound, always with us, never a nuisance. He sits hogging the best place by the fire and makes me feel that he is my guardian and I am lucky to have him there. He is everywhere in the court, listening to everyone, befriending everyone, smoothing over difficulties and—without a doubt—reporting everything back to My Lady. Wherever I go, he is there, interested in all my doings, quick with sympathetic spiritual advice, constantly alert to my needs and my thoughts, chatting with my ladies. It does not take me long to realize that he knows everything that is going on at court, and I don’t doubt that he reports it all to her. He has been My Lady’s confessor and greatest friend for years, and he assures her that I should eat red meat, well cooked, and that he himself will answer for the papal permission. He pats my hand and tells me that nothing matters more than my health, nothing matters more to him than that I am well and strong, that the baby grows, and he assures me that God feels just the same.

Then, after Easter, while my mother and my two sisters are sewing baby clothes in My Lady the King’s Mother’s presence chamber, a messenger, covered with dust from the road, comes in all his dirt to the doorway, saying he has an urgent message from His Grace the King.

For once, she does not look down her long nose, insist on her own grandeur, and send him away to change his clothes. She takes one astounded look at his grave face and admits him at once into her private room, and goes in behind him, closing the door herself, so that no one can overhear the news that he brings.

My mother’s needle is suspended over her sewing as she raises her head and watches the man go by. Then she gives a little sigh, as a woman quietly contented with her world, and goes back to her work. Cecily and I exchange one anxious look.

“What is it?” I ask my mother, as soft as a breath.

Her gray eyes are downcast, on her work. “How would I know?”

The door to My Lady’s private room is closed for a long time. The messenger comes out, walks through all of us ladies as if he has been commanded to march by saying nothing, and still the door remains closed. Only at dinnertime does My Lady come out and take her seat on the great chair under the cloth of estate. Grim-faced, she waits in silence for the head of her household to tell her that dinner is served.

The archbishop, John Morton, comes and stands beside her as if ready to leap forwards with a benediction, but she sits, flinty-faced, saying nothing, not even when he leans down as if to catch the quietest whisper.

“Is everything well with His Grace the King?” my mother inquires, her voice light and pleasant.

My Lady looks as if she would rather keep her silence. “He has been troubled by some disloyalty,” she says. “There are still traitors in the kingdom, I am sorry to say.”

My mother raises her eyebrows, and makes a little tutting noise as if she is sorry too, and says nothing.

“I hope His Grace is safe?” I try.

“That fool and traitor Francis Lovell has abused the sanctuary he was allowed and come out and raised an army against my son!” Lady Margaret declares in a sudden, hideous outburst of rage. She is shaking all over, her face flushed scarlet. Now that she has allowed herself to speak, she cannot keep from shouting, spittle flying from her mouth, the words tumbling out, her headdress trembling in her fury as she clutches the arms of her chair as if to hold herself seated. “How could he? How dare he? He hid himself in sanctuary to avoid the punishment of defeat and now he is out of his earth like a fox.”

“God forgive him!” the archbishop exclaims.

I gasp, I cannot help myself. Francis Lovell was Richard’s boyhood friend and dearest companion. He rode out to battle at his side, and when Richard went down he fled to sanctuary. He can only have come out for a good reason. He is no fool, he would never ride out for a lost cause. Lovell would never have come out of sanctuary and raised his standard without knowing that he had support. There must be a ring of men, known only to one another, who have been waiting for the moment—perhaps as soon as Henry left the safety of London. They must be prepared and ready to challenge him. And they will not be coming against him alone, they must have an alternative king in mind. They must have someone to put in his place.

The king’s mother glares at me as if I too might burst into the flames of rebellion, looking for signs of treason, as if she might see a mark of Cain on my forehead. “Like a dog,” she says spitefully. “Isn’t that what they called him? Lovell the dog? He has come out of his kennel like a cur and dares to challenge my son’s peace. Henry will be distraught! And I not with him! He will be so shocked!”

“God bless him,” the archbishop murmurs, touching the gold crucifix on the chain of pearls at his waist.

My mother is a portrait of concern. “Raised an army?” she repeats. “Francis Lovell?”

“He will regret it,” My Lady swears. “Him and Thomas Stafford with him. They will regret challenging the peace and majesty of my son. God Himself brought Henry to England. An insurrection against my son is a rebellion against the will of God. They are heretics as well as traitors.”

“Thomas Stafford too?” my mother coos. “A Stafford taking arms as well?”

“And his false-hearted brother! Two of them! Traitors! All of them!”

“Humphrey Stafford?” my mother exclaims softly. “Him too? And together the Staffords can call up so many men! Two sons of such a great name! And is His Grace the King marching against them? Is he mustering his troops?”

“No, no.” Lady Margaret waves the question away with a flutter of her hand, as if no one will doubt the king’s courage if she insists that he should hide in Lincoln and let someone else do the fighting. “Why should he go? There is no point in him going. I have written to him to bid him stay back. His uncle, Jasper Tudor, will lead his men. Henry has mustered thousands of men for Jasper’s army. And promised forgiveness to everyone who surrenders. He wrote to me that they are chasing the rebels north, towards Middleham.”

It was Richard’s favorite castle, his boyhood home. In all the northern counties the men hurrying to join Francis Lovell, his dearest friend and boyhood companion, will be those who knew Richard and Francis when they were living there as children. Francis knows the country all around Middleham; he will know where to make ambushes and where to hide.

“Heavens,” my mother says equably. “We must pray for the king.”

The king’s mother gasps with relief at the suggestion. “Of course, of course. The court will go to chapel after dinner. That’s a very good suggestion of yours, Your Grace. I will order a special Mass.” She nods at the archbishop, who bows and leaves, as if to alert God.

Maggie, my cousin, stirs slightly in her seat at this. She knows that a special Mass ordered by My Lady for the safety of her son is going to go on for two hours at least. At once, my Lady the King’s Mother switches her hard gaze to my little cousin. “It seems that there are still some sinful fools who support the lost House of York,” she says. “Even though the House of York is finished and all its heirs are dead.”