The White Princess

Our cousin John de la Pole is a living heir, sworn to Henry’s service; Maggie’s brother Edward is an heir in direct line; but nobody is going to point this out to My Lady. Maggie’s brother is safe in the nursery for now, and Maggie’s gaze is pinned firmly on the floorboards beneath her slippered feet. She says nothing.

My mother rises and moves gracefully towards the door, pausing when she stands before Maggie, shielding her from the angry stare of My Lady. “I shall go and fetch my rosary and my prayer book,” she says. “Would you want me to fetch your missal from your altar?”

My Lady the King’s Mother is diverted at once. “Yes, yes, thank you. And summon the choir to the chapel as well. Everyone must fetch their rosaries,” she says. “We’ll go straight to chapel after dinner.”

As we pray, I try to imagine what is happening, as if I had my mother’s gift of sight and could see all the way up the Great North Road to Middleham Castle in Yorkshire. If Lovell can get behind those solid walls he can hold out for months, perhaps years. If the North rises up for him, then they will outnumber any Tudor army under the command of Jasper. The North has always been passionately for the House of York, Middleham loved Richard as their good lord, the altar in the Middleham chapel carries white roses, perhaps forever. I glance sideways at my mother, who is the picture of devotion, on her knees, her eyes closed, her face turned upwards, a shaft of light illuminating her serene loveliness, as beautiful as a timeless angel, meditating on the sins of the world.

“Did you know of this?” I whisper, bending my head over my working fingers as if I am telling my rosary beads.

She does not open her eyes or turn her head, while her lips move as if she is saying a prayer. “Some of it. Sir Francis sent me a message.”

“Are they fighting for us?”

“Of course.”

“D’you think they will win?”

A fleeting smile crosses her rapt face. “Perhaps. But I know one thing.”

“What?”

“They have frightened the Tudors half to death. Did you see her face? Did you see her archbishop as he ran from the room?”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, MAY 1486

The first I know of trouble in the streets is the great creak as the huge outer doors of Westminster Palace are hauled shut by dozens of men, and then the thunderous bang as they slam into place. Then I hear the heavy thud as the counterweighted beam is pulled into the struts to hold the gates shut. We are barricading ourselves inside the royal palace; the royal family of England is so afraid of Londoners that we are locking London out.

With my hand on my big belly, I go to my mother’s rooms. She is at her window, looking over the walls to the streets beyond, my cousin Maggie on one side and my sister Anne on the other. She barely turns as I run in, but Maggie says over her shoulder, “They’re doubling the guards on the palace walls. You can see them, dashing out of the guardhouse into place.”

“What’s happening?” I ask. “What’s happening down there?”

“The people are rising against Henry Tudor,” my mother says calmly.

“What?”

“They’re gathering outside the palace, mustering, in their hundreds.”

I feel the baby move uneasily in my belly. I sit down, take a gasping breath. “What should we do?”

“Stay here,” my mother says steadily. “Until we can see our way.”

“What way?” I ask impatiently. “Where will we be safe?”

She looks back at my white face and smiles. “Be calm, my dear. I mean, we stay here till we know who’s won.”

“Do we even know who’s fighting?”

She nods. “It is the English people who still love the House of York, against the new king,” she says. “We’re safe either way. If Lovell wins in Yorkshire, if the Stafford brothers win their battles in Worcestershire, if these London citizens take the Tower and then set siege here—then we come out.”

“And do what?” I whisper. I am torn between a growing excitement and an absolute dread.

“Retake the throne,” my mother says easily. “Henry Tudor is in a desperate fight to hold his kingdom, only nine months after winning it.”

“Retake the throne!” My voice is a squeak of terror.

My mother shrugs. “It’s not lost to us until England is at peace and united behind Henry Tudor. This could be just another battle in the Cousins’ War. Henry could be just an episode.”

“The cousins are all gone!” I exclaim. “The brothers who were of the houses of Lancaster and York are all gone!”

She smiles. “Henry Tudor is a cousin of the House of Beaufort,” she reminds me. “You are of the House of York. You have a cousin in John de la Pole, your aunt Elizabeth’s son. You have a cousin in Edward Earl of Warwick, your uncle George’s son. There is another generation of cousins—the question is only whether they want to go to war against the one who is now on the throne.”

“He’s ordained king! And my husband!” I raise my voice, but nothing perturbs her.

She shrugs. “So you win either way.”

“D’you see what they’re carrying?” Maggie squeaks with excitement. “Do you see the flag?”

I rise from my chair and look over her head. “I can’t see it from here.”

“It’s my flag,” she says, her voice trembling with joy. “It’s the ragged staff of Warwick. And they’re calling my name. They’re calling À Warwick! À Warwick! They’re calling for Teddy.”

I look over her bobbing head to my mother. “They’re calling for Edward, the heir of York,” I say quietly. “They’re calling for a York boy.”

“Yes,” she says equably. “Of course they are.”

We wait for news. It is hard for me to bear the wait, knowing that my friends and my family and my house are up in arms against my own husband. But it is harder on My Lady the King’s Mother, who seems to have given up sleeping altogether but is every night on her knees before the little altar in her privy chamber, and all day in the chapel. She grows thin and gray with worry; the thought of her only son far away in this faithless country, with no protection but his uncle’s army, makes her ill with fear. She accuses his friends of failing him, his supporters of fading away from him. She lists their names in her prayers to God, one after another, the men who flocked to the victor but will abandon a failure. She goes without food, fasting to draw down the blessing of God; but we can all see that she is sick with the growing fear that despite it all, her son is not blessed by God, that for some unknown reason, God has turned against the Tudors. He has given them the throne of England but not the power to hold it.

There are skirmishes between the London bands and the Tudor forces in the little villages in the countryside outside Westminster, as if every crossroads is calling out À Warwick! At Highbury there is a pitched battle with the rebels armed with stones, rakes, and scythes against the heavily armed royal guard. There are stories of Henry’s soldiers throwing down the Tudor standard and running to join the rebels. There are whispers that the great merchants of London and even the City Fathers are supporting the mobs that roam the streets shouting for the return of the House of York.

Lady Margaret orders the shutters closed over all the windows that face the streets, so that we cannot see the running battles that are being fought below the very walls of the palace. Then she orders the shutters bolted on the other windows too so that we can’t hear the mob shouting support for York, demanding that Edward of Warwick, my little cousin Teddy, come out and wave to them.

We keep him from the windows of the schoolroom, we forbid the servants to gossip, but still he knows that the people of England are calling for him to be king.

“Henry is the king,” he volunteers to me as I listen to him read a story in the schoolroom.

“Henry is the king,” I confirm.

Maggie glances over at the two of us, frowning with worry.

“So they shouldn’t shout for me,” he says. He seems quite resigned.

“No, they should not,” I say. “They will soon stop shouting.”

“But they don’t want a Tudor king.”

“Now, Teddy,” Margaret interrupts. “You know you must say nothing.”

I put my hand over his. “It doesn’t matter what they want,” I tell him. “Henry won the battle and was crowned Henry VII. He is King of England, whatever anyone says. And we would all be very, very wrong if we forgot that he is King of England.”

He looks at me with his bright honest face. “I won’t do that,” he promises me. “I don’t forget things. I know he’s king. You’d better tell the boys in the streets.”

I don’t tell the boys in the streets. Lady Margaret does not allow anyone out of the great gates until slowly the excitement dies down. The walls of Westminster Palace are not breached, the thick gates cannot be forced. The ragged mobs are kept off, they are driven away, they flee the city or they go back into sullen hiding. The streets of London become quiet again, and we open the shutters at the windows and the heavy gates of the palace as if we were confident rulers and can welcome our people. But I notice that the mood in the capital is surly and every visit to market provokes a quarrel between the court servants and the traders. We keep double sentries on the walls and we still have no news from the North. We simply have no idea whether Henry has met the rebels in a battle, nor who has won.

Finally at the end of May—when the court should be planning the sports of the summer, walking by the river, practicing jousting, rehearsing plays, making music, and courting—a letter comes from Henry for My Lady, with a note for me, and an open letter to the Parliament, carried by my uncle Edward Woodville with a smartly turned out party of yeomen of the guard, as if to show that the Tudor servants can wear their livery in safety all the way down the Great North Road from York to London.

“What does the king say?” my mother asks me.

“The rebellion is over,” I say, reading rapidly. “He says that Jasper Tudor pursued the rebels far into the North and then came back. Francis Lovell has escaped, but the Stafford brothers have fled back into sanctuary. He’s pulled them out of sanctuary.” I pause and look at my mother over the top of the paper. “He’s broken sanctuary,” I remark. “He’s broken the law of the Church. He says he’ll execute them.”

I hand her the letter, surprised at my own sense of relief. Of course I want the restoration of my house and the defeat of Richard’s enemy—sometimes I feel a thrill of violent desire at the sudden vivid image of Henry falling from his horse and fighting for his life on the ground in the middle of a cavalry charge as the hooves thunder by his head—and yet, this letter brings me the good news that my husband has survived. I am carrying a Tudor in my belly. Despite myself, I can’t wish Henry Tudor dead, thrown naked and bleeding across the back of his limping horse. I married him, I gave him my word, he is the father of my unborn child. I might have buried my heart in an unmarked grave, but I have promised my loyalty to the king. I was a York princess, but I am a Tudor wife. My future must be with Henry. “It’s over,” I repeat. “Thank God it’s over.”

“It’s not over at all,” my mother quietly disagrees. “It’s just beginning.”

PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, SUMMER 1486

Henry does not return to us for months, but continues his progress, enjoying the fruits of victory as the defeat of Lovell and the Staffords brings all the halfhearted supporters back to the Tudor side—some of them attracted by power, some of them afraid of defeat, all of them conscious that they failed to be prominent among the royal supporters when danger threatened. Humphrey Stafford is tried and executed for treason, but his younger brother Thomas is spared. Henry offers pardons as freely as he dares, terrified of driving supporters away by being too suspicious of them. He tells everyone that he will be a good king, a merciful king to all who accept his rule, and if they beg for forgiveness they will find him generous.

My Lady the King’s Mother makes representation to the Holy Father through her cat’s-paw John Morton, and the helpful word comes from Rome that the laws on sanctuary are to be changed to suit the Tudors. Traitors may not go into hiding behind the walls of the Church anymore. God is to be on the side of the king and to enforce the king’s justice. My Lady wants her son to rule England inside sanctuary, right up to the altar, perhaps all the way to heaven, and the Pope is persuaded to her view. Nowhere on earth can be safe from Henry’s yeomen of the guard. No door, not even one on holy ground, can be closed in their hard faces.

The might of English law is to favor the Tudors too. The judges obey the new king’s commands, trying men who followed the Staffords or Francis Lovell, pardoning some, punishing others, according to their instructions from Henry. In my father’s England the judges were supposed to make up their own minds, and a jury was supposed to be free of any influence but the truth. But now the judges wait to hear the preferences of the king before reaching their sentences. The statements of the accused men, even their pleas of guilt, are of less importance than what the king says they have done. Juries are not even consulted, not even sworn in. Henry, who stayed away from the fighting, rules at long distance through his spineless judges, and commands life and death.

Not until August does the king come home and at once he moves the court away from the city that threatened him, out of town to the beautiful newly restored Palace of Sheen by the river. My uncle Edward comes with him, and my cousin John de la Pole, riding easily in the royal train, smiling at comrades who do not wholly trust them, greeting my mother as a kinswoman in public and never, never talking with her in private, as if they have to demonstrate every day that there are no whispered secrets among the Yorks, that we are all reliably loyal to the House of Tudor.

There are many who are quick to say that the king does not dare to live in London, that he is afraid of the twisting streets and the dark ways of the city, of the sinuous secrets of the river and those who silently travel on it. There are many who say he is not sure of the loyalty of his own capital city and that he does not trust his safety within its walls. The trained bands of the city keep their own weapons to hand, and the apprentices are always ready to spring up and riot. If a king is well loved in London, then he has a wall of protection around him, a loyal army always at his doors guarding him. But a king with uncertain popularity is under threat every moment of the day, anything—hot weather, a play that goes wrong, an accident at a joust, the arrest of a popular youth—can trigger a riot which might unseat him.

Henry insists that we must move to Sheen as he loves the countryside in summer and exclaims at the beauty of the palace and the richness of the park. He congratulates me on the size of my belly and insists that I sit down all the time. When we walk together into dinner he demands that I lean heavily on his arm, as if my feet are likely to fail underneath me. He is tender and kind to me, and I am surprised to find that it is a relief to have him home. His mother’s anguished vigilance is soothed by the sight of him, the constant uneasiness of being a new court in an uncertain country is eased, and the court feels more normal with Henry riding out to hunt every morning and coming home boasting of fresh venison and game every night. His looks have improved during his long summertime journey around England, his skin warmed by the sunshine, and his face more relaxed and smiling. He was afraid of the North of England before he went there, but once the worst of his fears did indeed happen, and he survived it, he felt victorious once again.

He comes to my room every evening, sometimes bringing a syllabub straight from the kitchen for me to drink while it is warm, as if we did not have a hundred servants to do my bidding. I laugh at him, carrying the little jug and the cup, neat as a groom of the servery.

“Well, you’re used to having people do things for you,” he says. “You were raised in a royal household with dozens of servants waiting around the room for something to do. But in Brittany I had to serve myself. Sometimes we had no house servants. Actually, sometimes we had no house, we were all but homeless.”

I go to my chair by the fire, but that is not good enough for the mother of the next prince.

“Sit on the bed, sit on the bed, put your feet up,” he urges, and helps me up, taking my shoes and pressing the cup in my hands. Like a pair of little merchants snug in their town house, we eat our supper alone together. Henry puts a poker into the heart of the fire and when it is hot, plunges it into a jug of small ale. The drink seethes and he pours it out while it is steaming and tastes it.

“I can tell you my heart turned to stone at York,” he says to me frankly. “Freezing cold wind and a rain that could cut through you, and the faces of the women like stone itself. They looked at me as if I had personally murdered their only son. You know what they’re like—they love Richard as dearly as if he rode out only yesterday. Why do they do that? Why do they cling to him still?”

I bury my face in the syllabub cup so that he cannot see my swift betraying flinch of grief.

“He had that York gift, didn’t he?” he presses me. “Of making people love him? Like your father King Edward did? Like you have? It’s a blessing, there’s no real sense to it. It’s just that some men have a charm, don’t they? And then people follow them? People just follow them?”

I shrug. I can’t trust my voice to speak of why everyone loved Richard, of the friends who would have laid down their lives for him and who, even now after his death, still fight his enemies for love of his memory. The common soldiers who will still brawl in taverns when someone says that he was a usurper. The fishwives who will draw a knife on anyone who says he was hunchbacked or weak.

“I don’t have it, do I?” Henry asks me bluntly. “Whatever it is—a gift or a trick or a talent. I don’t have it. Everywhere we went, I smiled and waved and did all that I could, all that I should. I acted the part of a king sure of his throne even though I sometimes felt like a penniless pretender with no one who believes in me but a besotted mother and a doting uncle, a pawn for the big players who are the kings of Europe. I’ve never been someone deeply beloved by a city, I’ve never had an army roar my name. I’m not a man who is followed for love.”

“You won the battle,” I say dryly. “You had enough men follow you on the day. That’s all that matters, that one day. As you tell everyone: you’re king. You’re king by right of conquest.”

“I won with hired troops, paid by the King of France. I won with an army loaned to me from Brittany. One half of them were mercenaries and the other half were murderous criminals pulled out of the jails. I didn’t have men that served me for love. I’m not beloved,” he says quietly. “I don’t think I ever will be. I don’t have the knack of it.”

I lower the cup and for a moment our eyes meet. In that one accidental exchange I can see that he is thinking that he is not even loved by his own wife. He is—simply—loveless. He spent his youth waiting for the throne of England, he risked his life fighting for the throne of England, and now he finds it is a hollow crown indeed; there is no heart at the center. It is empty.

I can think of nothing to fill the awkward silence. “You have adherents,” I offer.

He gives a short bitter laugh. “Oh yes, I have bought some: the Courtenays and the Howards. And I have the friends that my mother has made for me. I can count on a few friends from the old days, my uncle, the Earl of Oxford. I can trust the Stanleys, and my mother’s kin.” He pauses. “It’s an odd question for a husband to ask his wife, but I could think of nothing else when they told me that Lovell had come against me. I know that he was Richard’s friend. I see that Francis Lovell loves Richard so much that he fights on even when Richard is dead. It made me wonder: can I count on you?”

“Why would you even ask?”

“Because they all tell me that you loved Richard too. And I know you well enough now to be sure that you were not guided by ambition to be his queen, you were driven by love. So that’s why I ask you. Do you love him still? Like Lord Lovell? Like the women of York? Do you love him despite his death? Like York does, like Lord Lovell does? Or can I count on you?”

I shift slightly as if I am uncomfortable on the soft bed, sipping my drink. I gesture to my belly. “As you say, I am your wife. You can count on that. I am about to have your child. You can count on that.”

He nods. “We both know how that came about. It was done to breed a child; it was not an act of love. You would have refused me if you could have done, and every night you turned your face away. But I have been wondering, while I was gone, facing such unfriendliness, facing a rebellion, whether loyalty might grow, whether trust can grow between us?”

He does not even mention love.

I glance away. I cannot meet his steady gaze, and I cannot answer his question. “All this I have already promised,” I say inadequately. “I said my marriage vows.”

He hears the refusal in my voice. Gently he leans over and takes the empty cup from me. “I’ll leave it at that, then,” he says, and goes from my room.

ST. SWITHIN’S PRIORY, WINCHESTER, SEPTEMBER 1486

A rosy sun in saffron clouds is sinking below the sill of my window in the September evening as I wake from my afternoon nap and lie, enjoying the warmth on my face, knowing that this is my last day of sunshine. This evening I have to dress up, take the compliments of the court, receive their gifts, and go into confinement to await the birth of my baby. My confinement rooms will be darkened by shutters, my windows closed, even the feeble light of the candles will be shaded until the baby is born.

If My Lady the King’s Mother was able publicly to declare when the baby was conceived—a full month before our wedding—she would have had me locked up four weeks ago. She has already written in her Royal Book that a queen must be confined a full six weeks before the expected date of a birth. She must give a farewell dinner and the court must escort her to the door of the confinement chamber. She must go in, and not come out again (God willing, writes the pious lady at this point) until six weeks after the birth of a healthy child, when the babe is brought out to be christened, and she emerges to be churched and can take her place at court once more. A stay in silence and darkness of a long three months’ duration. I read this, in her elegant black-ink handwriting, and I study her opinions about the quality of the tapestries on the walls and the hangings on the bed, and I think that only a barren woman would compose such a regime.

My Lady the King’s Mother had only one child, her precious son Henry, and she has been barren since his birth. I think that if there were any chance that she would be put away from the world for three months every year, the orders on confinement would be very different. These rules are not to secure my privacy and rest, they are to keep me out of the way of the court so that she can take my place for three glorious long months every time her son gets me with child. It is as simple as that.

But this time, wonderfully, the joke is on her, for since we have, all three of us, loudly and publicly declared that the baby is a honeymoon baby, the blessedly quick result of a January wedding, it should be born in the middle of October, and so by her own rules, I don’t have to go into confinement until now, the first week in September. If she had put me into darkness at seven and a half months, I should have missed all of August, but I have been free—big-bellied but gloriously free—and I have laughed up my sleeve for a month as I have seen this deception eat away at her.

Now I expect to spend only a week or so before the birth in this gloomy twilight, banned from the outside world, seeing no man but a priest through a shaded screen. Then I will have six long weeks of isolation after the birth. In my absence I know that My Lady will relish ruling the court, receiving congratulations on the birth of her grandchild, supervising the christening and ordering the feast, while I am locked in my rooms and no man—not even my husband, her son—can see me.

My maid is bringing a green gown from the wardrobe for my official farewell. I wave it away, I am so very tired of wearing Tudor green, when the door bursts open and Maggie comes running into the room and flings herself on her knees before me. “Elizabeth, I mean Your Grace! Elizabeth! Oh, Elizabeth, save Teddy!”

The baby seems to jump in alarm in my belly as I leap off the bed and catch at the hangings as the room swings dizzily around me. “Teddy?”

“They’re taking him! They’re taking him away!”

“Careful!” my sister Cecily warns at once, hurrying to my side and steadying me on my feet. I don’t even hear her.

“Taking him where?”

“To the Tower!” Maggie cries out. “To the Tower! Oh! Come quick and stop them. Please!”

“Go to the king,” I throw at Cecily over my shoulder as I quickly head to the door. “Give him my compliments and ask if I may come to see him at once.” I grab my cousin Maggie’s arm and say, “Come on, I’ll come with you and stop them.”

Hurriedly, I go barefoot down the long stone corridors, the herbs brushed by my trailing nightgown, then Maggie sprints ahead of me up the circular stone staircase to the nursery floor, where she and Edward and my little sisters Catherine and Bridget have their rooms with their tutors and their maids. But then I see her fall back, and I hear the noise of half a dozen heavy boots coming down the stairs. “You can’t take him!” I hear her say. “I have the queen here! You can’t take him.”

As they come down the curve of the stair I see first the booted feet of the leading man, then his deep scarlet leggings, and then his bright scarlet tunic trimmed and quartered with gold lace: the uniform of the yeomen of the guard, Henry’s newly created personal troop. Behind him comes another, and another; they have sent a corps of ten men to collect a pale and shaking little boy of eleven. Edward is so afraid that the last man is holding him under the armpits so that he does not fall down the stairs; his feet are dangling, his skinny legs kicking as they half-carry him to where I am standing at the foot of the stairs. He looks like a doll with brown tousled curls and wide frightened eyes.

“Maggie!” he cries, on seeing his sister. “Maggie, tell them to put me down!”

I step forwards. “I am Elizabeth of York,” I say to the man at the front. “Wife of the king. This is my cousin, the Earl of Warwick. You shouldn’t even touch him. What d’you think you are doing?”

“Elizabeth, tell them to put me down!” Teddy insists. “Put me down! Put me down!”

“Release him,” I say to the man who is holding him.

Abruptly the guard drops him, but as soon as Teddy’s feet touch the floor he collapses into a heap, weeping with frustration. Maggie is down beside him in a moment, hugging him to her shoulder, smoothing his hair, stroking his cheeks, petting him into quietness. He pulls back from her shoulder to look earnestly into her eyes. “They lifted me from my desk in the schoolroom,” he exclaims in his piping little-boy voice. He is shocked that anyone should touch him without his permission; he has been an earl all his life, he has only ever been gently raised and carefully served. For a moment, looking at his tearstained face I think of the two boys in the Tower who were lifted from their beds, and there was no one there to stop the men who came for them.

“Orders of the king,” the commander of the yeomen says briefly to me. “He won’t be harmed.”

“There has been a mistake. He has to stay here, with us, his family,” I reply. “Wait here, while I go to speak to His Grace the King, my husband.”

“My orders are clear,” the man starts to argue, as the door opens and Henry appears in the doorway, dressed for riding, a whip in one hand, his expensive leather gloves in the other. My sister Cecily peeps around him to see Maggie and me, with young Edward struggling to his feet.

“What’s this?” Henry demands, without a word of greeting.

“There’s been some mistake,” I say. I am so relieved to see him that I forget to curtsey, but go quickly towards him and take his warm hand. “The yeomen thought they had to take Edward to the Tower.”

“They do,” Henry says shortly.

I am startled at his tone. “But my lord . . .”

He nods at the yeoman. “Carry on. Take the boy.”

Maggie gives a little yelp of dismay and flings her arm around Teddy’s neck.

“My lord,” I say urgently. “Edward is my cousin. He has done nothing. He is studying in the nursery here with my sisters and his sister. He loves you as his king.”

“I do,” Teddy says clearly. “I have promised. They told me to say that I promise, and so I did.”

The yeomen have closed up around him again, but they are waiting for Henry to speak.

“Please,” I say. “Please let Teddy stay here with all of us. You know he would never harm anyone. Certainly not you.”

Henry takes me gently by the shoulder and leads me away from the rest of them. “You should be resting,” he says. “You should not have been disturbed by this. You should not be upset. You should be going into confinement. This was all supposed to happen after you had gone in.”

“I’m very near to my time,” I whisper urgently to him. “As you know. Very near. Your mother says that I must stay calm, it might hurt the baby if I’m not calm. But I won’t be able to be calm if Teddy is taken from us. Please let him stay with us. I am feeling unhappy.” I take a swift glance at his piercing brown eyes which are scanning my face. “Very unhappy, Henry. I feel distressed. I am troubled. Please tell me that it’ll be all right.”

“Go and lie down in your room,” he says. “I’ll sort this out. You shouldn’t have been troubled. You shouldn’t have been told.”

“I’ll go to my room,” I promise. “But I must have your word that Teddy stays with us. I’ll go, as soon as I know that Teddy can stay here.”

With a sudden sense of dread I see My Lady the King’s Mother step into the room. “I will take you back to your bedchamber,” she offers. Some of her ladies-in-waiting come in behind her. “Come.”

I hesitate. “Go on,” Henry says. “Go with my mother. I’ll settle things here and then come and see you.”

“But Teddy stays with us,” I stipulate.

Henry hesitates and as he does so, his mother steps quietly around me to stand behind me. She wraps me in her arms, holding me close. For a moment I think it is a loving embrace, then I feel the strength in her grip. Two of her ladies-in-waiting come up on either side of her and hold my arms. I am captured, to my absolute amazement, I am held. One of the ladies scoops up Maggie and two of them hold her as the yeomen of the guard lift Teddy bodily and carry him from the room.

“No!” I scream.

Maggie is struggling and kicking, lashing out to get to her brother.

“No! You can’t take Teddy, he’s done nothing! Not the Tower! Not Teddy!”

Henry throws one horrified glance at me, held by his mother, struggling to be free, and then turns and goes out of the room, following his guard.

“Henry!” I scream after him.

My Lady the King’s Mother puts a hard hand over my mouth to silence me and we hear the tramp of the guards’ feet going down the gallery and then down the stairs at the end. Then we hear the outer door bang. When there is silence, My Lady takes her hand from my mouth.

“How dare you! How dare you hold me? Let me go!”

“I will take you to your room,” she says steadily. “You must not be upset.”

“I am upset!” I scream at her. “I am upset! Teddy can’t go to the Tower.”

She does not even answer me but nods at her ladies to follow her and they guide me firmly from the room. Behind me, Maggie has collapsed into tears, and the women who were holding her lower her gently to the ground and wipe her face and whisper to her that everything will be well. My sister Cecily is aghast at the sudden, smooth violence of the scene. I want her to go and fetch our mother, but she is stupid with shock, staring, from me to My Lady, as if the king’s mother had grown fangs and wings and was holding me prisoner.

“Come,” My Lady says. “You should lie down.”

She leads the way and the women release me to follow her. I walk behind her, struggling to regain my temper. “My Lady, I must ask you to intercede for my little cousin Edward,” I say to her stiff back, her white wimple, her rigid shoulders. “I beg you to speak to your son and ask him to release Teddy. You know Teddy is a young boy innocent of any bad thought. You made him your ward, any accusation of him is a reflection on you.”

She says nothing, leading the way past the closed doors. I am following her blindly, searching for words that will make her stop, turn, agree, as she opens the double doors of a darkened room.

“He is your ward,” I say. “He should be in your keeping.”

She does not answer me. “Here. Come in. Rest.”

I step inside. “Lady Margaret, I beg of you . . .” I start, and then I see that her ladies have followed us into the shadowy room and one of them has turned the key in the lock of the door and given it quietly to My Lady.

“What are you doing?” I demand.

“This is your confinement chamber,” she answers.

Now, for the first time, I realize where she has led me. It is a long, beautiful room with tall arched windows, blocked with tapestries so that no light creeps in. One of the ladies-in-waiting is lighting the candles, their yellow flickering light illuminating the bare stone walls and the high arched ceiling. The far end of the room is sheltered by a screen, and I can see an altar and the candles burning before a monstrance, a crucifix, a picture of Our Lady. Before the screen are prayer stools and before them the fireplace and a grand chair and lesser stools arranged in a conversational circle. Chillingly, I see that my sewing is on the table by the grand chair, and the book that I was reading before I lay down for my nap has been taken from my bedchamber and is open beside it.

Next is a dining table and six chairs, wine and water in beautiful Venetian glass jugs on the table, gold plates ready for serving dinner, a box with pastries in case of hunger.

Nearest to us is a grand bed, with thick oak posts and rich curtains and tester. On an impulse I open the chest at the foot of the bed and there, neatly folded and interspersed with dried lavender flowers, are my favorite gowns and my best linen, ready for me to wear when they fit me again. There is a day bed, next to the chest, and a beautifully carved and engraved royal cradle, all ready with linen beside the bed.

“What is this?” I ask as if I don’t know. “What is this? What is this?”

“You are in confinement,” Lady Margaret says patiently, as if speaking to an idiot. “For your health and for the health of your child.”

“What about Teddy?”

“He has been taken to the Tower for his own safety. He was in danger here. He needs to be carefully guarded. But I will speak to the king about your cousin. I will tell you what he says. Without question, he will judge rightly.”

“I want to see the king now!”

She pauses. “Now, daughter, you know that you cannot see him, or any man, until you come out of confinement,” she says reasonably. “But I will give him any message or take him any letter you wish to write.”

“When I have given birth you will have to let me out,” I say breathlessly. It is as if the room is airless and I am struggling to breathe. “Then I will see the king and tell him that I have been imprisoned in here.”

She sighs as if I am very foolish. “Really, Your Grace! You must be calm. We all agreed you were entering your confinement this evening, you knew full well that you were doing this today.”

“What about the dinner and bidding farewell to the court?”

“Your health was not strong enough. You said so yourself.”

I am so amazed by her lie that I gape at her. “When did I say that?”

“You said you were distressed. You said you were troubled. Here there is neither distress nor trouble. You will stay here, under my guidance, until you have safely given birth to the child.”

“I will see my mother, I will see her at once!” I say. I am furious to hear my voice tremble. But I am afraid of My Lady in this darkened room, and I feel powerless. My earliest memory is of being confined, in sanctuary, in a damp warren of cold rooms under the chapel at Westminster Abbey. I have a horror of confined spaces and dark places, and now I am trembling with anger and fear. “I will see my mother. The king said that I should see her. The king promised me that she would be with me in here.”

“She will come into confinement with you,” she concedes. “Of course.” She pauses. “And she will stay with you until you come out. When the baby is born. She will share your confinement.”

I just gape at her. She has all the power and I have none. I have been as good as imprisoned by her and by the convention of royal births which she has codified and to which I agreed. Now I am locked in one shadowy room for weeks, and she has the key.

“I am free,” I say boldly. “I’m not a prisoner. I am here to give birth. I chose to come in here. I am not held against my will. I am free. If I want to walk out, I can just walk out. Nobody can stop me, I am the wife of the King of England.”

“Of course you are,” she says, and then she goes out through the door and turns the key in the lock from the outside, and leaves me. I am locked in.

My mother comes in at dinnertime, holding Maggie’s hand. “We’ve come to join you,” she says.

Maggie is white as if she were deathly sick, her eyes red-rimmed from crying.

“What about Teddy?”

My mother shakes her head. “They took him to the Tower.”

“Why would they do that?”

“They shouted À Warwick when they fought Jasper Tudor in the North. They carried the standard of the ragged staff in London,” my mother says, as if this is reason enough.

“They were fighting for Teddy,” Maggie tells me. “Even though he didn’t ask them to—even though he would never ask them to. He knows not to say such things. I’ve taught him. He knows that King Henry is the king. He knows to say nothing about the House of York.”

“There’s no charge against him,” my mother says briefly. “He’s not charged with treason. Not charged with anything. The king says he is only acting to protect Teddy. He says that Teddy might be seized by rebels and used by them as a figurehead. He says that Teddy is safer in the Tower for now.”

My laughter at this extraordinary lie turns into a sob. “Safer in the Tower! Were my brothers safer in the Tower?”

My mother grimaces.

“I’m sorry,” I say at once. “Forgive me, I’m sorry. Did the king say how long he will keep Teddy there?”

Maggie goes quietly to the fireside and sinks down onto a footstool, her head turned away. “Poor child,” my mother says. To me she replies, “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. They took Teddy’s clothes and his books. I think we have to assume that His Grace will keep him there until he feels safe from rebellion.”

I look at her, the only one of us who may know how many rebels are biding their time, waiting for a call to rise for York, seeing the last skirmish as a stepping-stone to another, and from that to another—not as a defeat. She is a woman who never sees defeat. I wonder if she is their leader, if it is her determined optimism that drives them on. “Is something going to happen?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

PRIOR’S GREAT HALL, WINCHESTER, 19 SEPTEMBER 1486

I have to endure my confinement in a state of frightened misery. It is so like the long months in the darkness of the crypt below the chapel at Westminster that I wake every morning gasping for air and clinging to the carved headboard to stop myself jumping out of bed and screaming for help. I still have nightmares about darkness and the crowded rooms. My mother was pregnant, my father had fled overseas, our enemy was on the throne, I was four years old and Mary, my darling little sister now in heaven, and Cecily cried all the time for their toys, for their pets, for their father, not really knowing what they were crying for, only that our whole life was plunged into darkness, cold, and want. I used to look at my mother’s bleak white face and wonder if she would ever smile at me again. I knew that we were in terrible danger, but I was only four, I didn’t know what the danger was, or how this damp prison could keep us safe. Half a year we spent inside the walls of the crypt, half a year and we never saw the sun, never walked outside, never took a breath of fresh air. We became accustomed to a life in prison, as convicts become accustomed to the limits of their cell. Mother gave birth to Edward inside those damp walls, and we were filled with joy that at last we had a boy, an heir; but we knew we had no way of getting him to the throne—not even of getting him into the sun and air of his own country. Six months is a long, long time for a little girl of only four years old. I thought that we would never get out, I thought I would grow up taller and taller like a thin pale weed and die blanched like asparagus by the darkness. I had a dream that we were all turning into white-faced worms and that we would live underground forever. That was when I grew to hate confined spaces, hate the smell of damp, even hate the sound of the river lapping against the walls at nighttime, as I feared the waters would rise and rise and seep into my bed and drown me.

When my father came home, won two battles one after the other, saved us, rescued us like a knight in a storybook, we emerged from the crypt, out of the darkness like the risen Lord Himself coming into light. Then I swore to myself a childish oath that I would never be confined again.

This is fortune’s wheel—as my grandmother Jacquetta would say. Fortune’s wheel that takes you very high and then throws you very low, and there is nothing you can do but face the turn of it with courage. I remember clearly enough that as a little girl I could not find that courage.

When I was seventeen and the favorite of my father’s court, the most beautiful princess in England with everything before me, my father died and we fled back into sanctuary, for fear of his brother, my uncle Richard. Nine long months we waited in sanctuary, squabbling with one another, furious at our own failure, until my mother came to terms with Richard and I was freed into the light, to the court, to love. For the second time I came out of the dark like a ghost returning to life. Once again I blinked in the warm light of freedom like a hooded hawk suddenly set free to fly, and I swore I would never again be imprisoned. Once again, I am proved wrong.

My pains start at midnight. “It’s too early,” one of my women breathes in fear. “It’s at least a month too early.” I see a swift glance between those habitual conspirators, my mother and My Lady the King’s Mother. “It is a month too early,” My Lady confirms loudly for anyone who is counting. “We will have to pray.”

“My Lady, would you go to your own chapel and pray for our daughter?” my mother asks quickly and cleverly. “An early baby needs intercession with the saints. If you would be so good as to pray for her in her time of travail?”

My Lady hesitates, torn between God and curiosity. “I had thought to help her here. I thought I should witness . . .”

My mother shrugs at the room, the midwives, my sisters, the ladies-in-waiting. “Earthly tasks,” she says simply. “But who can pray like you?”

“I’ll get the priest, and the choir,” My Lady says. “Send me news throughout the night. I’ll get them to wake the archbishop. Our Lady will hear my prayers.”

They open the door for her and she goes out, excited by her mission. My mother does not even smile as she turns back to me and says, “Now, let’s get you walking.”

While My Lady labors on her knees, I labor all the night, until at dawn I turn my sweating face to my mother and say, “I feel strange, Lady Mother. I feel strange, like nothing I have felt before. I feel as if something terrible is about to happen. I’m afraid, Mama.”

She has laid aside her headdress, her hair is in a plait down her back, she has walked all the night beside me and now her tired face beams. “Lean on the women,” is all she says.

I had thought it would be a struggle, having heard all the terrible stories that women tell each other about screaming pain and babies that have to be turned, or babies that cannot be born and sometimes, fatally, have to be cut out; but my mother orders two of the midwives to stand on either side of me to bear me up, and she takes my face in her cool hands and looks into my eyes with her gray gaze and says quietly, “I am going to count for you. Be very still, beloved, and listen to my voice. I am going to count from one to ten and as I count you will find your limbs get heavier and your breathing gets deeper and all you can hear is my voice. You will feel as if you are floating, as if you are Melusina on the water, and you are floating down a river of sweet water and you will feel no pain, only a deep restfulness like sleep.”

I am watching her eyes and then I can see nothing but her steady expression and hear nothing but her quiet counting. The pains come and go in my belly, but it feels like a long way away and I float, as she promised that I would, as if on a current of sweet water.

I can see the steadiness of her gaze, and the illumination of her face, and I feel that we are in a time of unreality, as if she is making magic around us with her reliable quiet count which seemed to go slowly and take an eternity.

“There is nothing to fear,” she says to me softly. “There is never anything to fear. The worst fear is of fear itself, and you can conquer that.”

“How?” I murmur. It feels as if I am talking in my sleep, floating down a stream of sleep. “How can I conquer the worst fear?”

“You just decide,” she says simply. “Just decide that you are not going to be a fearful woman and when you come to something that makes you apprehensive, you face it and walk towards it. Remember—anything you fear, you walk slowly and steadily towards it. And smile.”

Her certainty and the description of her own courage make me smile even though my pains are coming and then easing, faster now, every few minutes or so, and I see her beloved beam in reply as her eyes crinkle.

“Choose to be brave,” she urges me. “All the women of your family are as brave as lions. We don’t whimper and we don’t regret.”

My stomach seems to grip and turn. “I think the baby is coming,” I say, and I breathe deeply.

“I think so too,” she says, and turns to the midwives who hold me up, one under each arm, while the third kneels before me and listens with her ear against my straining belly.

“Now,” she says.

My mother says to me: “Your baby is ready, let him come into the world.”

“She needs to push,” one of the midwives says sharply. “She needs to struggle. He has to be born in travail and pain.”

My mother overrules her. “You don’t need to struggle,” she says. “Your baby is coming. Help him come to us, open your body and let him come into the world. You give birth, you don’t force birth or besiege it. It’s not a battle, it’s an act of love. You give birth to your child and you can do it gently.”

I can feel the sinews of my body opening and stretching. “It’s coming!” I say, suddenly alert. “I can feel . . .”

And then there is a rush and a thrust and an inescapable sense of movement, and then the sharp crying noise of a child and my mother smiling, though her eyes are filled with tears, and she says to me: “You have a baby. Well done, Elizabeth. Your father would be proud of your courage.”

They release me from the grip they have taken on my arms, and I lie down on the day bed and turn to where the woman is wrapping a little wriggling bloody bundle and I hold out my arms, saying impatiently: “Give me my baby!” I take it, with a sense of wonder that it is a baby, so perfectly formed, with brown hair and a rosy mouth open to bellow, and a cross flushed face. But my mother pulls back the linen that they have wrapped it in, and shows me the perfect little body.

“A boy,” she says, and there is neither triumph nor joy in her voice, just a deep wonder, though her voice is hoarse with weariness. “God has answered Lady Margaret’s prayers again. His ways are mysterious indeed. You have given the Tudors what they need: a boy.”

The king himself has been waiting all night outside the door for the news, like a loving husband who cannot wait for a messenger. My mother throws her robe over her stained linen shift and goes out to tell him of our triumph, her head high with pride. They send word to My Lady the King’s Mother in the chapel that her prayers have been answered and God has secured the Tudor line. She comes in as the women are helping me into the great state bed to rest, and washing and swaddling the baby. His wet nurse curtseys and shows him to My Lady, who reaches for him greedily, as if he were a crown in a hawthorn bush. She snatches him up and holds him to her heart.

“A boy,” she says like a miser might breathe “God.” “God has answered my prayers.”

I nod. I am too tired to speak to her. My mother holds a cup of spiced hot ale to my lips and I smell the sugar and the brandy and drink deep. I feel as if I am floating, dreamy with exhaustion and the ending of pain, drunk on the birthing ale, triumphant at a successful birth, and dizzy with the thought that I have a baby, a son, and that he is perfect.

“Bring him here,” I command.

She does as I tell her and hands him to me. He is tiny, small as a doll, but every detail of him is perfect as if he has been handcrafted with endless care. He has hands like plump little starfish and tiny fingernails like the smallest of shells. As I hold him he opens his eyes of the most surprising dark blue, like a sea at midnight. He looks at me gravely, as if he too is surprised. He looks at me as if he understands all that is to be, as if he knows that he has been born to a great destiny and must fulfill it.

“Give him to the wet nurse,” My Lady prompts.

“In a moment.” I don’t care what she tells me to do. She may have command of her son, but I shall have command of mine. This is my baby, not hers, this is my son, not hers; he is an heir to the Tudors but he is my beloved.

He is the Tudor heir that makes the throne safe, that will start a dynasty that will last forever. “We will call him Arthur,” My Lady declares. I knew this was coming. They dragged me to Winchester for the birth so that we could claim the legacy of Arthur, so the baby could be born all but on the famous Round Table of the knights of Camelot, so the Tudors could claim to be the heirs of that miraculous kingdom, the greatness of England revived, and the beautiful chivalry of the country springing again from their noble line.

“I know,” I say. I have no objection. How can I? It was the very name that Richard had chosen for a son with me. He too dreamed of Camelot and chivalry, but unlike the Tudors he really tried to make a court of noble knights; unlike the Tudors he lived his life by the precepts of being a perfect gentle knight. I close my eyes at the ridiculous thought that Richard would have loved this baby, that he chose his name, that he wished him into being with me, that this is our child.

“Prince Arthur,” My Lady rules.

“I know,” I say again. It is as if everything I do with my husband, Henry, is a sad parody of the dreams I had with my lover, Richard.

“Why are you crying?” she demands impatiently.

I lift the sheet of my bed and wipe my eyes. “I’m not,” I say.

PRIOR’S GREAT HALL, WINCHESTER, 24 SEPTEMBER 1486

The christening of the flower of England, the rose of chivalry, is as grand and exaggerated as a regime newly come to power can devise. My Lady has been planning it for the past nine months, everything is done as ostentatiously as possible.

“I think they are going to dip him in gold and serve him on a platter,” my mother says sarcastically with a hidden smile at me, as she lifts the baby from his cradle early in the morning of his grand christening day. The rockers stand obediently behind her, watching her every move with the suspicion of professionals. The wet nurse is unlacing her bodice, impatient to feed the baby. My mother holds her grandson to her face and kisses his warm little body. He is sleepy, making a little snuffling noise. I hold out my arms, yearning for him, and she gives him to me and hugs us both.

As we watch, he opens his mouth in a little yawn, compresses his tiny face, flaps his arms like a fledgling, and then wails to be fed. “My lord prince,” my mother says lovingly. “Impatient as a king. Here, I’ll give him to Meg.”

The wet nurse is ready for him, but he cries and fusses and cannot latch on.

“Should I feed him?” I ask eagerly. “Would he feed from me?”

The rockers, the wet nurse, even my mother, all shake their heads in absolute unison.

“No,” my mother says regretfully. “That’s the price you pay for being a great lady, a queen. You can’t nurse your own child. You have won him a golden spoon and the best food in the world for all his life, but he cannot have his mother’s milk. You can’t mother him as you might wish. You’re not a poor woman. You’re not free. You have to be back in the king’s bed as soon as you are able and give us another baby boy.”

Jealously, I watch as he nuzzles at another woman’s breast and finally starts to feed. The wet nurse gives me a reassuring smile. “He’ll do well on my milk,” she says quietly. “You need not fear for him.”

“How many boys do you need?” I demand irritably of my mother. “Before I can stop bearing them? Before I can feed one?”

My mother, who gave birth to three royal boys and has none of them today, shrugs her shoulders. “It’s a dangerous world,” is all she says.

The door opens without a knock and My Lady comes in. “Is he ready?” she asks without preamble.

“He’s feeding.” My mother rises to her feet. “He’ll be ready in a little while. Are you waiting for him?”

Lady Margaret inhales the sweet, clean smell of the room as if she is greedy for him. “It’s all ready,” she says. “I have ordered it to the last detail. They are lining up in the Great Hall, waiting only for the Earl of Oxford.” She looks around for Anne and Cecily, and nods approval at their ornate gowns. “You are honored,” she says. “I have allowed you two the most important positions: carrying the chrism, carrying the prince himself.” She turns to my mother. “And you, named as godmother to a prince, a Tudor prince! Nobody can say that we have not united the families. Nobody can declare for York anymore. We are all one. I have planned today to prove it.” She looks at the wet nurse as if she would snatch the baby from her. “Will he be ready soon?”

My mother hides a smile. It is very clear that My Lady may know everything about christening princes but nothing about babies. “He will be as long as he needs,” she rules. “Probably less than an hour.”

“And what is he to wear?”

My mother gestures to the beautiful gown that she has made for him from the finest French lace. It has a train that sweeps to the floor and a tiny pleated ruff. Only she and I know that she cut it too large, so that this baby who was a full nine months in the womb will look small, as if he had come a month before his time.

“It will be the greatest ceremony in this reign,” My Lady the King’s Mother says. “Everyone is here. Everyone will see the future King of England, my grandson.”

They wait and wait. It makes no difference to me, bidden to rest in bed whatever takes place. The tradition is that the mother shall not be present at the christening and My Lady is not likely to break such a custom in order to bring me forwards. Besides, I am exhausted, torn between a sort of wild joy and a desperate fatigue. The baby feeds, they change his clout, they put him into my arms, and we sleep together, my arms around his tiny form, my nose sniffing his soft head.

The Earl of Oxford, hastily summoned, rides to Winchester as fast as he can, but My Lady the King’s Mother rules that they have waited long enough and will go on without him. They take the baby and off they all go. My mother is godmother, my sister Cecily carries the baby, my cousin Margaret leads the procession of women, Lord Neville goes before them carrying a lit taper. Thomas, Lord Stanley, and his son, and his brother Sir William—all heroes of Bosworth who stood on the hillside and watched Richard their king lead a charge without them, and then rode him down to his death—all walk together behind my son, as if he can count on their support, as if their word is worth anything, and present him to the altar.

While they are christening my boy, I wash and they dress me in a fine new gown of crimson lace and cloth of gold, they put the best sheets on my great bed, and help me back onto the pillows, so that I can be arranged, like a triumphant Madonna, for congratulations. I hear the trumpets outside my room, and the tramp of many feet. They throw open the double doors to my chamber and Cecily comes in, beaming, and puts my baby Arthur into my arms. My mother gives me a beautiful cup of gold for him, the Earl of Oxford has sent a pair of gilt basins, the Earl of Derby a saltcellar of gold. Everyone comes piling into my bedchamber with gifts, kneeling to me as the mother of the next king, kneeling to him to show their loyalty. I hold him and I smile and thank people for their kindness, as I look at men who loved Richard and promised loyalty to him, and who are now smiling at me and kissing my hand and agreeing, without words, that we shall never mention those long seasons ever again. That time shall be as if it never was. We will never speak of it, though they were the happiest days of my life, and maybe the happiest days of theirs, too.

The men swear their loyalty, and pay compliments, and then my mother says quietly: “Her Grace the Queen should rest now,” and My Lady the King’s Mother says at once, so that it shall not be my mother who gives an order: “Prince Arthur must be taken to his nursery. I have everything prepared for him.”

This day marks his entry into royal life, as a Tudor prince. In a few weeks’ time he will have his own nursery palace; we will not even sleep under the same roof. I shall reenter the court as soon as I am churched and Henry will come back to my bed to make another prince for the Tudors. I look at my little son, the tiny baby that he is, in his nursemaid’s arms, and know that they are taking him from me, and that he is prince and I am queen and we are mother and child alone together no more.

Even before I am churched and out of confinement, Henry rewards us Yorks with the marriage of my sister. The timing of the announcement is a compliment to me, a reward for giving him a son; but I understand by their waiting so long that if I had died in childbed, he would have had to marry another princess of York to secure the throne. He and his mother kept Cecily unmarried in case of my death. I went into the danger of childbed with my sister marked out for my widower. Truly, My Lady plans for everything.

Cecily comes to me breathless with excitement, her face flushed as if she is in love. I am tired, my breasts hurt, my privates hurt, everything hurts as my sister dances into my rooms and declares: “He has favored me! The king has favored me! My Lady has spoken for me, and the wedding is to happen at last! I am her goddaughter, but now I am to be even closer!”

“They have set your wedding day?”

“My betrothed came to tell me himself. Sir John. I shall be Lady Welles. And he is so handsome! And so rich!”

I look at her, a hundred harsh words on the tip of my tongue. This is a man who was raised to hate our family, whose father died under our arrows at the battle of Towton when his own artillery could not fire in the snow, whose half brother Sir Richard Welles and his son Robert were executed by our father on the battlefield for treachery. Cecily’s betrothed is Lady Margaret’s half brother, a Lancastrian by birth, by inclination, and by lifelong enmity to us. He is thirty-six years old to my sister’s seventeen, he has been our enemy all his life. He must hate her. “And this makes you happy?” I ask.

She does not even hear the skepticism in my tone. “Lady Margaret herself made this wedding,” she says. “She told him that though I am a princess of York I am charming. She said that: charming. She said that I am utterly suited to be the wife of a nobleman of the Tudor court. She said I am most likely to be fertile, she even praised you for having a boy. She said I am not puffed up with false pride.”

“Did she say legitimate?” I ask dryly. “For I can never remember whether we are princesses or not at the moment.”

Finally she hears the bitterness in my voice and she pauses in her jig, takes hold of my bedpost, and swings around to look at me. “Are you jealous of me for making a marriage for love, to a nobleman, and that I come to him untouched? With the favor of My Lady?” she taunts me. “That my reputation is as good as any maid’s in the world? With no secrets behind me? No scandals that might be unearthed? Nobody can say one word against me?”

“No,” I say wearily. I could weep for the aches and pains, the seep of blood, the matching seep of tears. I am missing my baby, and I am mourning for Richard. “I am glad for you, really. I am just tired.”

“Shall I send for your mother?” Our cousin Maggie steps forwards, frowning at Cecily. “Her Grace is still recovering!” she says quietly. “She shouldn’t be disturbed.”

“I only came to tell you I am to be married, I thought you would be happy for me,” Cecily says, aggrieved. “It is you who is being so unpleasant . . .”

“I know.” I force myself to change my tone. “And I should have said that I am glad for you, and that he is a lucky man to have such a princess.”

“Father had greater plans for me than this,” she points out. “I was raised for better than this. If you don’t congratulate me, you should pity me.”

“Yes,” I reply. “But all my pity is used up on myself. It doesn’t matter, Cecily, you can’t understand how I feel. You should be happy, I am glad for you. He’s a lucky man and, as you say, handsome and wealthy, and any one of My Lady the King’s Mother’s family is always going to be a favorite.”

“We’ll marry before Christmas,” she says. “When you are churched and back at court, we’ll marry and you can give me the royal wedding gift.”

“I shall so look forward to that,” I say, and little Maggie hears the sarcasm in my voice and shoots me a hidden smile.

“Good,” Cecily says. “I think I’ll wear scarlet like you did.”

“You can have my gown,” I promise her. “You can remake it to your size.”

“I can?” She flies to my chest of gowns and flings open the top. “And the wedding linen too?”

“Not the linen,” I stipulate. “But you can have the gown and the headdress.”

She gathers it up in her arms. “Everyone will compare us,” she warns me, her face bright with excitement. “How shall you like it if they say I look better than you in scarlet and black? How shall you like it if they say I am a prettier bride?”

I lie back on the pillows. “D’you know? I shan’t mind at all.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1486

Churched, dressed, wearing a little crown, I come out of my confinement to attend my sister’s wedding, and Henry greets me at the door with a kiss on my cheek and conducts me to the royal seats in the chapel at Westminster. It is to be a family affair. Lady Margaret is there, beaming at her half brother. My mother is in attendance on my sister. Anne is behind her, my cousin Maggie stands with me. Henry and I are side by side, and I can see him glance over at me, as if wanting to begin a conversation, but not knowing quite where to start.

Of course there is an unbearable awkwardness between us. When he last saw me, I was imploring him to let Teddy stay with us; he last saw me held by his mother and pushed into confinement. He did not do as I begged, and Teddy is still imprisoned in the Tower. He is afraid that I am angry with him. I see him glance sideways at me throughout the long prayers of the Wedding Mass, trying to guess at my mood.

“Will you come with me to the nursery when this is over?” he finally says, as the couple say their vows and the bishop raises their hands wrapped in his stole and tells us all that those whom God has joined together, no man can put asunder.

I turn a warm face to him. “Yes,” I say. “Of course. I go every day. Isn’t he perfect?”

“Such a handsome boy! And so strong!” he whispers eagerly. “And how do you feel? Are you . . .” He breaks off, embarrassed. “I hope you are fully recovered? I hope it was not too . . . painful?”

I try to look queenly and dignified, but his genuine expression of anxiety and concern prompt me to honesty: “I had no idea it would go on for so long! But my mother was a great comfort to me.”

“I hope you will forgive him for causing you pain?”

“I love him,” I say simply. “I’ve never seen a more beautiful baby. I have them bring him to me all day, every day, till they tell me I will spoil him.”

“I have been going to his nursery in the nighttime, before I go to bed,” he confesses. “I just sit by his crib and watch him sleeping. I can hardly believe that we have him. I keep fearing that he is not breathing and I tell his nurse to lift him and she swears he is all right, and then I see him give a little sigh and know that he is well. She must think I am a complete fool.”

Cecily and Sir John turn towards us all and start to walk, hand in hand, down the short aisle. Cecily is radiant in my red and black gown, her fair hair spread on her shoulders like a golden veil. She is shorter than me and they have taken up the hem. A maid, as I was not on my wedding day, she can lace it tightly, and they have tailored the sleeves so that her husband can see an enticing glimpse of wrist and arm. Beside her, Sir John looks weary, his face lined, grooves under his eyes like an old hound. But he pats her hand on his arm and inclines his head to listen to her.

Henry and I smile on the newly wedded couple. “I have provided a good husband for your sister,” he says to remind me that I am beholden to him, that I should be grateful. They pause when they reach us and Cecily sweeps a triumphant curtsey. I go forwards and kiss her on both cheeks, and I give my hand to her husband. “Sir John and Lady Welles,” I say, speaking the name that was once a byword for treachery. “I hope you will both be very happy.”

We give them the honor of the day and let them go first, before us all, and we follow them out of the chapel. As Henry takes my hand I say: “About Teddy . . .”

The face he turns to me is stern. “Don’t ask,” he says. “I am doing all that I dare for you by allowing your mother to stay at court. I should not even be doing that.”

“My mother? What is my mother to do with this?”

“God alone knows,” he says angrily. “Teddy’s part in the rebellion is nothing to what I hear about her. The rumors I hear and the news that my spies bring me are very bad. I can’t tell you how bad. It makes me sick to my belly to hear what they say. I have done all that I can for you and yours, Elizabeth. Don’t ask me to do more. Not just now.”

“What do they say against her?” I persist.

His face is bleak. “She is at the center of every whisper of disloyalty, she is almost certainly faithless to me, plotting against me, betraying us both, destroying the inheritance of her grandson. If she has spoken to even half the people who have been seen talking to her servants, then she is false, Elizabeth, false in her heart and false in her doings. She gives every sign of putting together rings of people who would rise against us. If I had any sense I would put her on trial for treason and know the truth. It is only for you and for your sake that I tell all the men who come to me with reports that they are all, every one of them, mistaken, all liars, all fools, and that she is true to me and to you.”

I can feel my knees start to buckle, as I look over to where my mother is laughing with her nephew John de la Pole. “My mother is innocent of everything!”

Henry shakes his head. “That’s too great a claim; for I know that she is not. All it shows me is that you are lying too. You have just shown me that you will lie for her, and to me.”

They are bringing in the yule log to burn in the great hearth of the hall of Westminster Palace. It is the trunk of a great tree, a gray-barked ash, many times broader than my arms’ span. It will burn without being extinguished for all the days of Christmas. The jester is dressed all in green, riding astride on it as they drag it in, standing up and trying to balance, falling from it, bounding up again like a deer, pretending to lie before it and rolling away before someone drags it over him. Both the servants and the court are singing carols that have words of the birth of Christ set to a tune and the rhythmic beat of a drum that is older by far. This is not just the Christmas story but a celebration of the return of the sun to the earth, and that is a story as ancient as the earth itself.

My Lady smilingly watches the scene, ready as ever to frown at bawdiness or point a finger at someone who uses the revels as an excuse for bad behavior. I am surprised she has allowed this pagan bringing-in of the green, but she is always anxious to adopt the habits of the former kings of England as if to show that her rule is not that much different from those others—the real kings who went before. She hopes to pass herself and her son off as royal by mimicking our ways.

My newly married sister, Cecily, my cousin Maggie, and my younger sister Anne are among my ladies watching with me, applauding as they wrestle the great tree trunk into the wide hearth. My mother is nearby with Catherine and Bridget at her side. Bridget is clapping her hands and laughing so loudly she can hardly stand. The servants are straining at the ropes that they have tied around the massive trunk, and now the jester has torn off a piece of ivy and is pretending to beat them. Bridget’s knees give way beneath her in her delight and she is nearly crying with laughter. My Lady looks over with a slight frown. The jester’s inventions are supposed to be amusing but not excessively so. My mother exchanges a rueful look with me, but she does not restrain Bridget’s exuberant joy.

As we watch, they finally get the yule log dragged into the fireplace and rolled over into the hot embers, and then the fire boys shovel the red-hot coals around it. The ivy that is binding the trunk crisps, smokes, and flares, and then the whole thing settles into the ashes and starts to glow. A little flicker of flame licks around the bark. The yule log is alight, the Christmas celebrations can begin.

The musicians start to play and I nod to my ladies that they can dance. I take pleasure in a court of beautiful, well-behaved ladies-in-waiting, just as my mother did when she was queen. I am watching them as they go through their paces, when I see my uncle Edward Woodville, my mother’s brother, stroll into the room from a side door, and come over to my mother with a little smile. They exchange a kiss on each cheek, and then they turn together, as if they would speak privately. It’s nothing, no one but me would notice it, but I watch as he speaks briefly but intently to her, as she nods as if in agreement. He bows over her hand, and comes across to me.

“I must bid you farewell, my niece, and wish you a happy Christmas and good health for you and the prince.”

“Surely you are staying at court for Christmas?”

He shakes his head. “I am going on a journey. I’m going on a great crusade as I have long promised I would.”

“Leaving court? But where are you going, my lord uncle?”

“To Lisbon. I’m taking a ship out of Greenwich tonight, and from there to Granada. I will serve under the most Christian kings and help them drive the Moors from Granada.”

“Lisbon! And then Granada?”

At once I glance towards My Lady the King’s Mother.

“She knows,” he reassures me. “The king knows. Indeed, I am going at his bidding. She is delighted at the thought of an Englishman on crusade against the heretic, and he has a few little tasks for me on the way.”

“What tasks?” I cannot stop myself lowering my voice to a whisper. My uncle Edward is one of the few members of our family trusted by the king and his mother. He was in exile with Henry, a sworn friend when Henry had few sworn friends. He escaped from my uncle Richard with two ships of his fleet, and was among the first to join Henry in Brittany. My uncle’s constant, reliable presence at the exiled little court assured Henry that we, the fallen royal family scuffling in sanctuary, were his allies. As Richard took the throne and made himself king, Henry, the pretender, was encouraged to trust us by the steady presence of my uncle Edward, fiercely loyal to his sister, the former queen.

He was not the only York loyalist who made his way to Henry’s court of turncoats and exiles. My half brother Thomas Grey was there too, keeping our claim before Henry, reminding him of his promises to marry me. I can only imagine Henry’s horror when he woke one morning and his scant servants at his tiny court told him that Thomas Grey’s horse was gone from the stables and his bed was untouched and he realized that we had changed sides and were for Richard. Henry and Jasper sent riders after Thomas Grey and they captured him. They held him as a prisoner for my mother’s goodwill—fearing that nothing could guarantee her goodwill—and they still hold him in France, a guest of honor with a promise to return but still without a horse to ride home.

My uncle Edward played a longer game, a deeper game. He stayed with Henry and invaded with him at Bosworth, and served beside him at the battle. He serves him still. Henry never forgets his friends, nor does he forget those who changed their minds during his time of exile. I think he will never again trust my brother Thomas, but he loves my uncle Edward and calls him his friend.

“He is sending me on a diplomatic mission,” my uncle says.

“To the King of Portugal? Surely Lisbon is not on the way to Granada?”

He spreads his hand and smiles at me, as if I might share a joke, or a secret. “Not directly to the King of Portugal. He wants me to see something that has arisen, appeared at the Portuguese court.”

“What sort of thing?”

He drops on his knee and kisses my hand. “A secret thing, a precious thing,” he says gleefully, then he rises up and goes. I look around for my mother and see her smiling at him as he works his way through the laughing, dancing, celebrating court. She watches his swift bow to Henry and the king’s discreet acknowledgment, and then my uncle slips through the great doors of the hall, as quiet as any spy.

That night Henry comes to my bed. He will come every single night only excepting the week of my course, or the nights of holy fasts or saints’ days. We have to conceive another child, we have to have another son. One is not enough to ensure the safety of the line. One is not enough to keep a new king steady on his throne. One son does not demonstrate powerfully enough the blessing of God on the new family.

It is an act without desire for me, from which I get no pleasure, part of my work as wife to the king. I face it with a sort of resigned weariness. He takes care not to hurt me, he keeps his weight off me, he does not kiss or caress me, which I would hate; he is as quick and as gentle as he can be. He takes care not to disgust me, washing before he comes to me, wearing clean linen. I don’t ask for any more.

But I find that I enjoy his company, the quiet peaceful time alone with him at the end of a day that is always crowded with people. He and I sit before the fire and we talk about the baby, how he is feeding today, how he is starting to smile when he sees me. I am certain that he knows me from all others, and knows Henry too, and that this proves his remarkable intelligence and promise. I can speak of our baby like this to no one else. Who but his father would linger over the exact width of his gummy little smile or the blueness of his eyes, or the sweetness of his little lick of tawny hair on his forehead? Who but his father would speculate with me as to whether he will be a scholar prince, or a warrior prince, or a prince like my father, who loved learning and was a commander of men above all others?

The servants leave us with mulled wine, bread and cheese, nuts and candied fruits, and we have a supper, cozy in our night robes, side by side in our chairs, my feet tucked under me for warmth, his bare feet proffered to the glowing fire. We look like a happy couple in easy companionship. Sometimes I forget myself, and think this is what we are.

“You said good-bye to your uncle?”

“Yes, I did,” I say cautiously. “He said he was going on crusade, and to serve you.”

“Did your mother tell you what he is doing for me?”

I shake my head.

“You’re a discreet family.” Henry smiles. “Anyone would think you had been raised to be spies.”

I shake my head at once. “You know we were not. We were raised as royals.”

“I know. But now that I am a king it sometimes seems to me that it’s the same thing. There’s a rumor reached me that there is some page boy in Portugal pretending to be a bastard son of your father, saying that he should be recognized as a royal duke of England.”

I am watching the flames and I keep facing the fire and only slowly turn to my husband. I meet an intense brown glare. He is watching me closely, and I have a sense of an unexpected interrogation, something keen and unfriendly in the warmth of the evening room. I am aware of my expression, of keeping my face absolutely impassive. I am suddenly aware of everything. “Oh, really? Who is he?”

“Of course your father had more bastards than anyone could count,” he says carelessly. “I suppose we should expect to find one or two every year.”

“Yes he did,” I say. “And I hope that God forgives him, for my mother never did.”

He laughs at that, but it only diverts him for a moment. “Did she not? How did he dare to defy her?”

I smile. “He would laugh at her and kiss her and buy her earrings. And besides, she was almost always with child, and he was king. Who could say no to him?”

“It’s inconvenient. It leaves a scattering of bastard half brothers and sisters,” Henry points out. “More Yorks than any man needs.”

“Especially if he’s not York himself,” I observe. “But we know most of them. Grace, in my mother’s service, is one of my father’s bastard daughters. She could not love Mother more if she were her own daughter, and we treat her as a half sister. She is absolutely loyal to you.”

“Well, this lad is claiming royal blood like her, but I don’t expect to bring him to court. I thought your uncle might go and take a look at him. Speak to his master, say that we don’t want the embarrassment of a bastard twig making much of himself, another little shoot on the Plantagenet vine. Tell him that we don’t need a new royal duke, that we have Yorks enough. Quietly remind him who is king now in England. Point out that connections to the earlier king are no advantage, not to the page boy nor to his master.”

“Who’s his master? A Portuguese?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says vaguely, but his gaze on my face never wavers. “I can’t remember. Is it Edward Brampton? D’you know of him? Ever heard of him?”

I frown as if I am trying to recall, though his name strikes a chord in my mind so loud that I think Henry must hear it like a tolling bell. Slowly, I shake my head. I swallow, but my throat is dry and I take a sip of wine. “Edward Brampton?” I query. “I recognize the name. I think he served my father? I’m not sure. Is he an Englishman?”

“A Jew,” Henry says contemptuously. “A Jew that was in England, converted to serve your father, indeed your father stood as his sponsor into the Church. So you must have heard of him, though you’ve forgotten him. He must have come to court. He’s not been in England since I came to the throne, and now he lives everywhere and nowhere, so he’s probably still a heretic Jew, reverted to his heresy. He has this lad in his keeping, making claims, causing trouble for no reason. Your uncle will speak to him, I don’t doubt. Your uncle will prevail upon him to silence the lad. Your uncle Edward is very eager to serve me.”

“He is,” I agree. “We all want you to know that we are loyal to you.”

He smiles. “Well, here’s a little claimant whose loyalty I don’t want. Your uncle will no doubt silence him one way or another.”

I nod as if I am not much interested.

“You don’t want to see the lad?” he asks idly, as if offering me a treat. “This imposter? What if he is a bastard child of your father’s? Your half brother? Don’t you want to see him? Shall I tell Edward to bring the lad to court? You could take him into your household? Or shall I say he must be silenced where he is, overseas, far away?”

I shake my head. I imagine that the boy’s life depends upon what I say. I gamble that Henry is keenly watching me, expecting me to ask for the boy to be brought home. I think his little life may depend upon my appearance of indifference. “He’s of no interest to me,” I say, shrugging. “And it would irritate my mother. But you do what you think best.”

There is a little silence, in which I sip my wine. I offer to pour him another cup. The chink of silver jug against silver cup makes a noise like the counting of coins, of thirty pieces of silver.

The boy may be of no interest to me; but it seems he is of interest to others. In London there are the wildest rumors that both my brothers Edward and Richard escaped from imprisonment in the Tower years ago, almost as soon as our uncle Richard was crowned, and are making their way home from their hiding place, to claim the throne. The sons of York will walk in the garden of England again, this bitterly cold winter will turn to spring with their coming, the white roses will bloom, and everyone will be happy.

Someone pins a ballad on my saddle when I am about to ride. I scan the lines; it is predicting the sun of York shining on England again and everyone being happy. At once I rip it from the pommel and take it to the king, leaving my horse waiting in the stable yard.

“I thought you should see this. What does it mean?” I ask Henry.

“It means that there are people who are prepared to print treason as well as tell lies,” he says grimly. He twitches it out of my hand. “It means there are people wasting their time setting treason to music.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Find the man that printed it and slit his ears,” he says bleakly. “Cut out his tongue. What are you going to do?”

I shrug as if I am quite indifferent to the poet who sang of the House of York, or the printer who published his poem. “Shall I go riding?” I ask him.

“You don’t care about this—” he gestures to the ballad in his hand “—this dross?”

I shake my head, my eyes wide. “No. Why should I? Does it matter at all?”

He smiles. “Not to you, it seems.”

I turn away. “People will always talk nonsense,” I say indifferently.

He catches my hand and kisses it. “You were right to bring it to me,” he says. “Always tell me whatever nonsense you hear, however unimportant it seems to you.”

“Of course,” I say.

He walks with me to the stable yard. “At least it reassures me about you.”

Then my own maid whispers to me that there was a great stir in the meat market of Smithfield when someone said that Edward, my little cousin Teddy, was escaped from the Tower and was planting his standard in Warwick Castle, and the House of York was rallying to his cause.

“Half the butcher apprentices said they should take their meat cleavers and march to serve him,” she says. “The others said they should march on the Tower and free him.”

I dare not even ask Henry about this, his face is so grim. We are all trapped inside the palace by the icy winds and sleet and snow that fall every day. Henry rides out on frozen roads in a quiet fury, while his mother spends all her time on her knees on the cold stone floors of the chapel. Every day brings more and more stories of stars that have been seen to dance in the cold skies, prophesying a white rose. Someone sees a white rose made from the frost on the grass at Bosworth at dawn. There are poems nailed to the door of Westminster Abbey. A gang of wherry boys sings carols under the windows of the Tower, and Edward of Warwick swings open his window and waves to them, and calls out “Merry Christmas!” The king and his mother walk stiffly as if they are frozen with horror.

“Well, they are frozen with horror,” my mother confirms cheerfully. “Their great fear is that the battle of Bosworth turns out not to be the end of the war but just another battle, just one of the many, many battles that have been. So many battles that people are forgetting their names. Their great fear is that the Cousins’ War goes on, only now with the House of Beaufort against York instead of Lancaster against York.”

“But who would fight for York?”

“Thousands,” my mother says shortly. “Tens of thousands. Nobody knows how many. Your husband has not made himself very beloved in the country, though God knows that he has tried. Those people who served him and had their rewards are looking for more than he can bring himself to give. Those that he has pardoned find they have to pay fees to him for their good behavior, and then more fines as surety. This king’s pardon is more like a punishment for life than a true forgiveness. People resent it. Those who opposed him have seen no reason to change their minds. He’s not a York king like your father. He’s not beloved. He does not have a way with people.”

“He has to establish his rule,” I protest. He spends half his time looking behind him to see if his allies are still with him.”

She gives me a funny sideways smile. “You defend him?” she asks incredulously. “To me?”

“I don’t blame him for being anxious,” I say. “I don’t blame him for not being the sweet herb of March. I don’t blame him for not having a white rose made of snow or three suns in the sky shining on him. He can’t help that.”

At once her face softens. “Truly, a king like Edward comes perhaps once in a century,” she says. “Everyone loved him.”

I grit my teeth. “Charm is not a measure of a king,” I say irritably. “He can’t be king based on whether he’s charming or not.”

“No,” she says. “And Master Tudor is certainly not that.”

“What did you call him?”

She claps her hand over her mouth and her gray eyes dance. “Little Master Tudor, and his mother, Madonna Margaret of the Unending Self-Congratulation.”

I cannot help but laugh but then I wave my hand to still her. “No, hush. He can’t help how he is,” I say. “He was raised in hiding, he was brought up to be a pretender to the throne. People can only be charming when they’re confident. He can’t be confident.”

“Exactly,” she says. “So no one has any confidence in him.”

“But who would lead the rebels?” I ask. “There’s no one of age, there are no York commanders. We don’t have an heir.” At her silence I press her. “We don’t have an heir. Do we?”

Her eyes slide away from my question. “Edward of Warwick is the heir, of course, and if you’re looking for another heir to the House of York, there is your cousin John de la Pole. There’s his younger brother Edmund. They are both Edward’s nephews just as much as Edward of Warwick.”

“Descended from my aunt Elizabeth,” I point out. “The female line. Not the son of a royal duke, but the son of a duchess. And John has sworn loyalty and he serves in the privy council. Edmund too. And Edward, poor Teddy, has sworn loyalty and is in the Tower. We have all promised that he would not turn against Henry and we have all taught him to be loyal. In truth, there are no sons of York who would lead a rebellion against Henry Tudor—are there?”

She shrugs. “I’m sure I don’t know. All the people speak of a hero like a ghost or a sleeping saint, or a pretender. It would almost make you believe that there is an heir of York hidden out in the hills, a king waiting for the call to battle, sleeping like the true Arthur of England, ready to rise. People love to dream, so how should anyone contradict them?”

I take her hands. “Mother, please, let’s have the truth between us for once. I don’t forget that night, long ago, when we sent a page boy into the Tower instead of my brother Richard.”

She looks at me as if I am dreaming, like the people who hope for King Arthur to rise again; but I have a very clear memory of the poor boy from the streets of the City, whose parents sold him to us, assured that we needed him for nothing more than a little playacting, that we would send him back safely to them. I put the cap on his little head myself, and I drew up the scarf around his face, and warned him to say nothing. We told the men who came for my brother Richard that the little boy was the prince himself, we said he was ill with a sore throat and had lost his voice. Nobody could imagine that we would dare to create such an imposter. Of course, they wanted to believe us, and the old archbishop himself, Thomas Bourchier, took him away and told everyone that Prince Richard was in the Tower with his brother.

She does not glance to right or left; she knows that no one is nearby. But even alone with me, speaking in a whisper, she does not confirm or deny it either.

“You sent a page boy into the Tower, and you sent my little brother away,” I whisper. “You told me to say nothing about it. Not to ask you, not to speak to anyone, not even to tell my sisters, and I never have. Only once you told me that he was safe. Once you told me that Sir Edward Brampton had brought him to you. I’ve never asked for more than that.”

“He is hidden in silence,” is all she says.

“Is he still alive?” I ask urgently. “Is he alive and is he going to come back to England for his throne?”

“He is safe in silence.”

“Is he the boy in Portugal?” I demand. “The boy that Uncle Edward has gone to see? Sir Edward Brampton’s page boy?”

She looks at me as if she would tell me the truth if she could. “How would I know?” she asks. “How do I know who is claiming to be a prince of York? In Lisbon, so far away? I’ll know him when I see him, I can tell you that. I will tell you when I see him, I can promise you that. But perhaps I’ll never see him.”

THE TOWER OF LONDON, SPRING 1487

We move the court to the City that is buzzing like a beehive waking to spring. It feels as if everyone is talking about princes and dukes and the House of York rising up again like a climbing plant bursting into leaf. Everyone has heard for certain from someone that the Yorks have a boy, an heir, that he is on a ship coming into Greenwich, that he has been hiding in a secret chamber in the Tower under a stone stair, that he is marching from Scotland, that he is going to be put on the throne by his own brother-in-law, Henry, that his sister the queen has him at court and is only waiting to reveal him to her astounded husband. That he is a page boy with an Englishman in Portugal, a boatman’s son in Flanders, hidden by his aunt the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, asleep on a distant island, living off apples in the loft of his mother’s old house at Grafton, hidden in the Tower with his cousin Edward of Warwick. Suddenly, like butterflies in springtime, there are a thousand pretend boys, dancing about like motes in the sunlight, waiting for the word to come together into an army. The Tudors who thought they had taken the crown on a muddy field in the middle of England, who thought they had secured their line by trudging up the road to London, find themselves besieged by will-o’-the-wisps, defied by faeries. Everyone talks of a York heir, everyone knows someone who has seen him and swears it is true. Everywhere Henry goes, people fall silent so that no whisper reaches his ears; but before and behind him there is a patter of sound like a warning drizzle before a storm of rain. The people of England are waiting for a new king to present himself, for a prince to rise like the spring tide and flood the world with white roses.

We move to the Tower as if Henry no longer loves his country palace in springtime, as he swore that he did, only last year. This year, he feels the need of a castle that is easily defended, as if he wants his home to dominate the skyline, as if he wants to be in the heart of the city, unmistakably its lord; though everyone talks of another, from the drovers coming into Smithfield discussing a priceless white ram glimpsed on a dawn hillside, to the fisherwomen on the quay, who swear that one dark night, two years ago, they saw the watergate of the Tower slide up in silence and a little wherry come out under the dripping gate which carried a boy, a single boy, the flower of York, and it went swiftly downstream to freedom.

Henry and I are lodged in the royal rooms in the White Tower, overlooking the lower building that housed the two boys: my brother Edward awaiting his coronation but expecting death, and the page boy that my mother and I sent in place of Richard. Henry sees my pallor as we enter the royal rooms that are bright with wood fires, and hung with rich tapestries, and presses my hand, saying nothing. The baby comes in behind me, in the arms of his nursemaid, and I say flatly: “Prince Arthur is to sleep next door, in my privy chamber.”

“My Lady Mother put your crucifix and prie-dieu in there,” he says. “She has made a pretty privy chamber for you, and prepared his nursery on the next floor.”

I don’t waste time arguing. “I’m not staying in this place unless our baby sleeps next door to me.”

“Elizabeth . . .” he says gently. “You know we are safe here, safer here than anywhere else.”

“My son sleeps beside me.”

He nods. He doesn’t argue or even ask me what I fear. We have been married little more than a year and already there is a terrible silence around some subjects. We never speak of the disappearance of my brothers—a stranger listening to us would think it was a secret between us, a guilty secret. We never speak of my year at Richard’s court. We never speak of the conception of Arthur and that he was not, as My Lady so loudly celebrates, a honeymoon child conceived in sanctified love on the very night of a happy wedding. Together we hold so many secrets in silence, after only a year. What lies will we tell each other in ten years?

“It looks odd,” is all he says. “People will talk.”

“Why are we even here and not in the country?”

He shifts his feet, looking away from me. “We’re going in procession to Mass next Sunday,” he says. “All of us.”

“What d’you mean, all of us?”

His discomfort increases. “The royal family . . .”

I wait.

“Your cousin Edward is going to walk with us.”

“What has Teddy to do with this?”

He takes my arm and leads me away from my ladies-in-waiting, who are entering the rooms and remarking on the tapestries, unpacking their sewing and packs of cards. Someone is tuning a lute, the twanging chords echoing loudly. I am the only one who hates this bleak castle; to everyone else it is a familiar home. Henry and I go out into the long gallery, where the scent of the fresh strewing herbs is heady in the narrow room.

“People are saying that Edward has escaped from the Tower and is raising an army in Warwickshire.”

“Edward?” I repeat stupidly.

“Edward of Warwick, your cousin Teddy. So he’s going to process in state with us to St. Paul’s so that everyone can see him and know that he lives with us as a valued member of the family.”

I nod. “He walks with us. You show him.”

“Yes.”

“And when everyone has seen him, they know that he is not raising his standard in Warwickshire.”

“Yes.”

“They know that he is alive.”

“Yes.”

“And these rumors die down . . .”

Henry waits.

“Then after that he can live with us as a member of our family,” I rule. “He can be as he seems to be. We can show him as our beloved cousin and he can be our beloved cousin. We show him going to Mass with us freely, he can live with us freely. We can turn the show into the reality. That’s what you want to do, as king. You show yourself as king and then you hope to be accepted as king. If I take part in this play, in this masque of Teddy being beloved and living with us, then you will make it true.”

He hesitates.

“It is my condition,” I say simply. “If you want me to act as if Teddy is our beloved cousin freely living with us, then you have to make the act into reality. I’ll walk with you in procession on Sunday to show that Teddy and all the Yorks are loyal supporters. And you will treat me, and all my family, as if you trust us.”

He hesitates for a moment and then, “Yes,” he says. “If our procession persuades everyone, and the rumors die down and everyone accepts that Teddy lives at court, as a loyal member of the family, he can come out of the Tower and live freely at court.”

“Free and trusted like my mother,” I insist. “Despite what anyone says.”

“Like your mother,” he agrees. “If the rumors die down.”

Maggie is at my side before dinner, rosy with joy at having spent all afternoon with her brother. “He has grown! He is taller than me! Oh! I have missed him so much!”

“Does he understand what he has to do?”

She nods. “I have told him carefully, and we practiced, so that he should make no mistake. He knows that he is to walk behind you and the king, he knows that he has to kneel to pray at Mass. I can walk beside him, can’t I? And then I can make sure he does it right?”

“Yes, yes, that would be best,” I say. “And if anyone cheers for him, he’s not to wave or shout a reply, or anything.”

“He knows,” she says. “He understands. I have explained to him why they want him to be seen.”

“Maggie, if he shows that he is a loyal member of the family, I believe that he can come back to live with us. It is essential that he does this right.”

Her mouth, her whole face trembles. “Could he?”

I take her in my arms and find that she is shaking with hope. “Oh, Maggie, I will try my best for him.”

Her tearstained face looks up at me. “He has to come out of here, Your Grace, it’s destroying him. He’s not doing his lessons in here, he sees no one.”

“Surely the king has provided tutors for him?”

She shakes her head. “They don’t come to him anymore. He spends his day lying in his bed reading the books that I send him, or staring at the ceiling, and looking out of the window. He is allowed out once a day to walk in the gardens. But he’s only eleven, he’s twelve this month. He should be at court, doing his lessons, playing games, learning how to ride. He should be growing into a man, with boys of his own age. But he is here, quite alone, seeing no one but the guards when they bring him his meals. He tells me that he thinks he is forgetting how to speak. He said that one day he spent all day trying to remember my face. He says that a whole day goes by and he cannot remember it has passed. So now he makes a mark on the wall for every day, like a prisoner. But then he fears he has lost count of the months.

“And he knows our father was executed in here, and he knows your brothers disappeared from here—boys just like him. He is bored and afraid at the same time, and he has no one to talk to. His guards are rough men, they play cards with him and win his few shillings off him, they swear in front of him and drink. He can’t stay here. I have to get him out.”

“I am horrified. “Oh, Maggie . . .”

“How is he to grow up as a royal duke if he is treated as a child traitor?” she demands. “This is destroying him, and I swore to my father that I would take care of him!”

I nod. “I’ll speak with the king again, Maggie. I will do what I can. And once people stop talking about him all the time, then I’m sure Henry will let him out.” I pause. “It’s as if our name is both our greatest pride and our curse,” I say. “If he were Edward of nowhere and not Edward of Warwick he would be living with us now.”

“I wish we were all no one of nowhere,” she says bitterly. “If I could choose I would have the name of Nobody and never come to court at all.”

My husband calls a meeting of the privy council to ask them for their advice on how to silence the rumors of the coming of a prince of York. They all know, they have all heard of a duke of York, even a bastard of York, coming to England to take the throne. John de la Pole, the son of my aunt Elizabeth of York, advises the king to keep a steady nerve, that the whispers will stop. His father, the Duke of Suffolk, tells Henry to be assured that there is no division between York and Tudor. Once the people see Edward walking with his family, they will be quiet again. John asks that Teddy might be released from the Tower—so that everyone can see that the Houses of York and Tudor are united. “We should show that we have nothing to fear,” he says, smiling at the king. “That’s the best way to scotch the rumors: show that we fear nothing.”

“That we are as one,” Henry says.

John reaches out to him and the king warmly clasps his hand. “We are as one,” he assures him.

The king sends for Edward, and Maggie and I bustle him into a new jerkin and comb down his hair. He is pale, with the terrible pallor of a child who never gets outside, and his arms and legs are thin though he should be growing strong. He has the York charm and good looks in his little-boy face but he is nervous, as my brothers never were. He reads so much and talks so little that he stammers when he has to speak, and will break off in the middle of a sentence to try to recall what he means to say. Living alone among rough men, he is desperately shy; he smiles only at Maggie and only with her can he talk fluently and without hesitation.

Maggie and I walk with him to the closed door of the privy council chamber, where the yeomen of the guard stand with their pikes crossed, shutting everyone out. He stops, like a young colt refusing a jump.

“They don’t want me to go in,” he says anxiously, looking at the big blank-faced men who stare past the three of us. “You have to do what they say. You always have to do what they say.”

The quaver of fear in his voice reminds me of the day that the men in this very livery carried him down the stairs and I could not save him.

“The king himself wants to see you,” I tell him. “They will open the door as you walk towards them. The doors will open as you get close.”

He glances up at me, his shy smile lighting up his face with sudden hope. “Because I’m an earl?”

“You are an earl,” I say quietly. “But they will open the door because it is the king’s wish. It is the king who matters, not us. What you must remember to say is that you are loyal to the king.”

He nods emphatically. “I promised,” he says. “I promised just as Maggie said I should.”

The procession from the Tower of London to St. Paul’s Cathedral is deliberately informal, as if the royal family strolled to church in their capital city every day. The yeomen of the guard walk with us, beside, behind, and in front, but more as if they were members of the household, leading the way to church, than guards. Henry goes in front with my mother, to signal to everyone the unity of this king with the former queen, and My Lady chooses to go hand in hand with me, showing everyone that the Princess of York is embedded in the House of Tudor. Behind us come my sisters, Cecily with her new husband, so that everyone can see that there is no princess of York of marrying age to form the focus of dissent, and behind her comes Edward our cousin, walking alone so that people waiting both on the right and left can see him clearly. He is well dressed, but he looks awkward and stumbles once as he starts to walk. Maggie walks behind him with my sisters Anne, Catherine, and Bridget, and she has to hold herself back from her little brother and not take his hand, as she used to do. This is a walk he has to do alone, this is a walk where he has to show himself alone, without any supporter, without any coercion, freely following in the train of the Tudor king.

When we get into the deep vaulted gloom of the church we all stand at the chancel steps for the Mass, and sense the crowds of London in the vast space behind us. Henry puts a hand on Edward’s shoulder and whispers in his ear and the boy obediently falls to his knees on the prie-dieu, rests his elbows on the velvet shelf, and raises his eyes to the altar. All the rest of us step back a little, as if to leave him in prayer, but in truth to make sure that everyone sees Edward of Warwick is devout, loyal, and, above everything else, in our keeping. He is not at Warwick Castle raising his standard, he is not in Ireland raising an army, he is not with his aunt the Duchess of Burgundy in Flanders creating a conspiracy. He is where he ought to be, with his loving royal family, on his knees to God.

After the service we dine with the clergy of St. Paul’s and then start to walk down to the river. Edward makes better progress and smiles and talks to my sisters. Then Henry orders him to walk beside John de la Pole, the two York cousins together. John de la Pole has been loyal to Henry since the first day of his reign, is constantly in his company, and serves him on the privy council, the inner circle of advisors. He is well known for his loyalty to the king and it sends a strong message to the crowds who line our way, and who lean out of the windows above our heads. Everyone can see that this is the real Edward of Warwick, beside the real John de la Pole, everyone can see that they are talking together and strolling home from church, as cousins do. Everyone can see that they are happy with their Tudor family; as I am, as Cecily is, as my mother is.

Henry waves to the citizens of London who are massing on the riverbank to see us all, and he summons me to stand beside him, and Edward beside me, so that everyone can see that we are as one, that Henry Tudor has done what some people swore was impossible: brought peace to England and an end to the wars of the cousins.

Then some fool in the crowd shouts loudly, “À Warwick!” the old rallying cry, and I flinch and look to my husband, expecting to see him furious. But his smile never falters, his hand raised in a lordly wave does not tremble. I look back at the crowd, and I see a small scuffle at the rear, as if the man who shouted has been knocked to the ground and is being pinned down. “What’s happening?” I ask Henry nervously.

“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all,” and turns and goes to his great throne in the stern of the boat, beckons us all on board, and sits down, kingly in every way, and gives the signal to cast off.

PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, SPRING 1487

But not even the evidence of their own eyes convinces people who are determined to believe the opposite. Only days after our walk through the streets of London, with the boy smiling in our midst, there are people swearing that Edward of Warwick escaped from the Tower while walking to church and is hiding in York, biding his time to come against the tyrant of the red dragon, the pretender to the throne, Henry the usurper, the false claimant.

We move out of the city to the Palace of Sheen, but Edward cannot be released from his rooms in the Tower to come too. “How can I take him with us?” Henry demands of me. “Can you doubt for a moment that if he was outside the safety of those walls then someone would get hold of him and next thing we would hear of him would be at the head of an army?”

“He would not!” I say despairingly. I begin to think that my husband will hold my little cousin in prison for life, he is so overly cautious. “You know Edward would not run away from us to lead an army! All he wants is to be in the schoolroom doing his lessons again. All he wants is to be allowed to ride out. All he wants is to be with his sister.”

But Henry looks at me with hard eyes as dark as Welsh coal, and says: “Of course he would lead an army. Anybody would. And besides, they might not give him any choice.”

“He’s twelve!” I exclaim. “He’s a child!”

“He’s old enough to sit on a horse while an army fights for him.”

“This is my cousin,” I say. “This is my own cousin, the son of my father’s brother. Please, be kingly, and release him.”

“You think he should be released because he is the son of your father’s brother? You think your family were so kindly when they had power? Elizabeth, your father held his own brother, Edward’s father, in the Tower and then executed him for treason! Your cousin Edward is the son of a traitor and a rebel, and the traitors shout his name when they muster against me. He won’t come out of the Tower until I know that we are safe, all four of us, my mother, you and me, and the true heir: Prince Arthur.”

He stamps to the door and turns to glower at me. “Don’t ask me again,” he orders. “Don’t dare to ask me again. You don’t know how much I do for love of you, already. More than I should. Far more than I should.”

He slams the door behind him and I hear the rattle as the guards hastily present arms as he marches by.

“How much do you do?” I ask the polished wood panels of the door. “And for love?”

Henry does not come to my room for all of Lent. It is traditional that a devout man would not touch his wife in the weeks before Easter, though the daffodils flood into gold alongside the riverbanks, the blackbirds sing love songs in a penetrating trill every dawn, the swans set about building huge bulky nests on the river path, and every other living thing is filled with joy and seeking a mate; but not us. Henry observes the fast of Lent as an obedient son of his mother and the Church, and so Maggie is my bedfellow and I become accustomed to her kneeling for hours in prayer and whispering her brother’s name over and over again.

One day I realize that she is praying to St. Anthony for her brother, and I quietly turn away. St. Anthony is the saint for missing things, for forlorn hopes and lost causes; she must feel that her brother is near to disappearing—an invisible boy like my own brothers, all three of them lost to their sisters, gone forever.

The court fasts throughout Lent, eating no meat, and there is no dancing or playing. My Lady wears black all the time, as if the ordeal of Christ has a special message for her, as if she alone understands His suffering. She and Henry pray together in private every evening as if they have been called to endure the coldness of the hearts of Englishmen to the Tudors, just as Jesus had to endure the loneliness of the desert and the failure of his disciples. The two of them are as martyrs together; nobody understands what they suffer but themselves.

Around My Lady and her son is a tight little world: the only advisor that she trusts, John Morton, her friend and confessor; Jasper Tudor, Henry’s uncle who raised him in exile; the friend who stood by him, John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, and the Stanleys, Lord Thomas and his brother Sir William. There are very, very few of them, isolated in such a great court, and they are so afraid of everyone else, it is as if they are always under siege in their own safe home.

I really begin to think that they experience a different world from the rest of us. One day, My Lady and I are walking together by the dazzling river, sun on our faces, white blossom on the hawthorn bushes, and the sweet light scent of nectar on the air, when she remarks that England is indeed a benighted desert of sin. My mother, light-footed on the spring grass, a bunch of dripping-stemmed daffodils sticky in her hand, hears this and cannot stop herself laughing out loud.

I fall back among my ladies to walk beside my mother. “I have to talk to you,” I say. “I have to know what you know.”

Her smile is serene and lovely as always. “A lifetime of learning,” she teases me. “An understanding of four languages, a love of music and appreciation of art, a great interest in printing and in writing in English as well as Latin. I am glad to see that at last you apply yourself to my wisdom.”

“My Lady the King’s Mother is ill with fear,” I point out to her. “She thinks the English springtime is a benighted desert. Her son is all but dumb. They trust no one but their own circle and every day there are more rumors in the outside world. It’s coming, isn’t it? A new rebellion? You know the plans and you know who will lead them.” I pause and lower my voice to a whisper. “He’s on the way, isn’t he?”

My mother says nothing for a moment but walks beside me in silence, graceful as ever. She pauses and turns to me, takes a daffodil bud, and tucks it gently into my hat. “Do you think I have said nothing to you ever since your marriage about these matters because it slipped my mind?” she asks quietly.

“No, of course not.”

“Because I thought you had no interest?”

I shake my head.

“Elizabeth, on your wedding day you promised to love, honor, and obey the king. On the day of your coronation you will have to promise, before God in the most solemn and binding of vows, to be his loyal subject, the first of his loyal subjects. You will take the crown on your head, you will take the holy oil on your breast. You cannot be forsworn then. You cannot know anything that you would have to keep from him. You cannot have secrets from him.”

“He doesn’t trust me!” I burst out. “Without you ever telling me a word he already suspects me of knowing a whole conspiracy and keeping it secret. Over and over again he asks me what I know, over and over again he warns me that he is making allowances for us. His mother is certain that I am a traitor to him, and I believe that he thinks so too.”

“He will come to trust you, perhaps,” she says. “If you have years together. You may grow to be a loving husband and wife, if you have long enough. And if I never tell you anything, then there will never be a moment where you have to lie to him. Or worse—never a moment when you have to choose where your loyalties lie. I wouldn’t want you to have to choose between your father’s family and your husband’s. I wouldn’t want you to have to choose between the claims of your little son and another.”

I am horrified at the thought of having to choose between Tudor and York. “But if I know nothing, then I am like a leaf on the water, I go wherever the current takes me. I don’t act, I do nothing.”

She smiles. “Yes. Why don’t you let the river take you? And we’ll see what she says.”

We turn in silence and head back along the riverbank to Sheen, the beautiful palace of many towers which dominates the curve of the river. As we walk towards the palace I see half a dozen horses gallop up to the king’s private door. The men dismount, and one pulls off his hat and goes inside.

My mother leads the ladies past the men-at-arms, and graciously acknowledges their salute. “You look weary,” she says pleasantly. “Come far?”

“Without stopping for sleep, all the way from Flanders,” one boasts. “We rode as if the devil was behind us.”

“Did you?”

“But he’s not behind us, he’s before us,” he confides quietly. “Ahead of us, and ahead of His Grace, and out and about raising an army while the rest of us are amazed.”

“That’s enough,” another man says. He pulls off his hat to me and to my mother. “I apologize, Your Grace. He’s been breathless for so long he has to talk now.”

My mother smiles on the man and on his captain. “Oh, that’s all right,” she says.

Within an hour the king has called a meeting of his inner council, the men he turns to when he is in danger. Jasper Tudor is there, his red head bowed, his grizzled eyebrows knitting together with worry at the threat to his nephew, to his line. The Earl of Oxford walks arm in arm with Henry, discussing mustering men, and which counties can be trusted and which must not be alarmed. John de la Pole comes into the council chamber on the heels of his fiercely loyal father, and the other friends and family follow: the Stanleys, the Courtenays, John Morton the archbishop, Reginald Bray, who is My Lady’s steward—all the men who put Henry Tudor on the throne and now find it is hard to keep him there.

I go to the nursery. I find My Lady the King’s Mother sitting in the big chair in the corner, watching the nurse changing the baby’s clout and wrapping him tight in his swaddling clothes. It is unusual for her to come here, but I see from her strained face and the beads in her hand that she is praying for his safety.

“Is it bad news?” I ask quietly.

She looks at me reproachfully, as if it is all my fault. “They say that the Duchess of Burgundy, your aunt, has found a general who will take her pay and do her bidding,” she says. “They say he is all but unbeatable.”

“A general?”

“And he is recruiting an army.”

“Will they come here?” I whisper. I look out of the window to the river and the quiet fields beyond.

“No,” she says determinedly. “For Jasper will stop them, Henry will stop them, and God Himself will stop them.”

On my way to my mother’s chambers, I hurry past the king’s rooms, but the door to the great presence chamber is still closed. He has most of the lords gathered together, and they will be frantically trying to judge what new threat this presents to the Tudor throne, how much they should fear, what they should do.

I find I am quickening my pace, my hand to my mouth. I am afraid of what is threatening us, and I am also afraid of the defense that Henry will mount against his own people that might be more violent and deadly than an actual invasion.

My mother’s rooms are closed too, the doors tightly shut, and there is no servant waiting outside to swing open the doors for me. The place is quiet—too quiet. I push open the door myself, and look at the empty room spread out in front of me like a tableau in a pageant before the actors arrive. None of her ladies is here, her musicians are absent, a lute leaning against a wall. All her things are untouched: her chairs, her tapestries, her book on a table, her sewing in a box; but she is missing. It seems as if she has gone.

Like a child, I can’t believe it. I say, “Mother? Lady Mother?” and I step into the quiet sunny presence chamber and look all around me.

I open the door to her privy chamber and it is empty too. There is a scrap of sewing left on one of the chairs, and a ribbon on the window seat, but nothing else. Helplessly, I pick up the ribbon as if it might be a sign, I twist it in my fingers. I cannot believe how quiet it is. The corner of a tapestry stirs in the draft from the door, the only movement in the room. Outside a wood pigeon coos, but that is the only sound. I say again: “Mama? Lady Mother?”

I tap on the door to her bedroom and swing it open, but I don’t expect to find her there. Her bed is stripped of her linen, the mattress lies bare. The wooden posts are stripped of her bed curtains. Wherever she has gone, she has taken her bedding with her. I open the chest at the foot of her bed, and find her clothes have gone too. I turn to the table where she sits while her maid combs her hair; her silvered mirror has gone, her ivory combs, her golden hairpins, her cut-glass phial of oil of lilies.

Her rooms are empty. It is like an enchantment; she has silently disappeared, in the space of a morning, and all in a moment.

I turn on my heel at once and go to the best rooms, the queen’s rooms, where My Lady the King’s Mother spends her days among her women, running her great estates, maintaining her power while her women sew shirts for the poor and listen to readings from the Bible. Her rooms are busy with people coming and going; I can hear the buzz of happy noise through the doors as I walk towards them, and when they are swung open and I am announced, I enter to see My Lady, seated under a cloth of gold like a queen, while around her are her own ladies and among them my mother’s companions, merged into one great court. My mother’s ladies look at me wide-eyed, as if they would whisper secrets to me; but whoever has taken my mother has made sure that they are silent.

“My Lady,” I say, sweeping her the smallest of curtseys due to my mother-in-law and mother to the king. She rises and executes the tiniest of bobs, and then we kiss each other’s cold cheeks. Her lips barely touch me, as I hold my breath as if I don’t want to inhale the smoky smell of incense that always hangs in her veiled headdress. We step back and take the measure of the other.

“Where is my mother?” I ask flatly.

She looks grave as if she were not ready to dance for joy. “Perhaps you should speak with my son the king.”

“He is in his chambers with his council. I don’t want to disturb him. But I shall do so and tell him that you sent me, if that is what you wish. Or can you tell me where my mother is. Or don’t you know? Are you just pretending to knowledge?”

“Of course I know!” she says, instantly affronted. She looks around at the avid faces and gestures to me that we should go through to an inner chamber, where we can talk alone. I follow her. As I go by my mother’s ladies I see that some of them are missing; my half sister Grace, my father’s bastard, is not here. I hope she has gone with my mother, wherever she is.

My Lady the King’s Mother closes the door herself, and gestures that I should sit. Careful of protocol, even now, we sit simultaneously.

“Where is my mother?” I say again.

“She was responsible for the rebellion,” My Lady says quietly. “She sent money and servants to Francis Lovell, she had messages from him. She knew what he was doing and she advised and supported him. She told him which households would hide him and give him men and arms outside York. While I was planning the king’s royal progress, she was planning a rebellion against him, planning to ambush him on his very route. She is the enemy of your husband and your son. I am very sorry for you, Elizabeth.”

I bristle, hardly hearing her. “I don’t need your pity!”

“You do,” she presses on. “For it is you and your husband that your own mother is plotting against. It is your death and downfall she is planning. She worked for Lovell’s rebellion and now she writes secretly to her sister-in-law in Flanders urging her to invade.”

“No. She would not.”

“We have proof,” she says. “There’s no doubt. I am sorry for it. This is a great shame to fall on you and your family. A disgrace to your family name.”

“Where is she?” I ask. My greatest fear is that they have taken her to the Tower, that she will be kept where her sons were held, and that she won’t come out either.

“She has retired from the world,” Lady Margaret says solemnly.

“What?”

“She has seen the error of her ways and gone to confess her sins and live with the good sisters at Bermondsey Abbey. She has chosen to live there. When my son put the evidence of her conspiracy before her, she accepted that she had sinned and that she would have to go.”

“I want to see her.”

“Certainly, you can go to see her,” Lady Margaret says quietly. “Of course.” I see a little hope flare in her veiled eyes. “You could stay with her.”

“Of course I’m not going to stay in Bermondsey Abbey. I shall visit her, and I shall speak with Henry, as she must come back to court.”

“She cannot have wealth and influence,” Lady Margaret says. “She would use it against your husband and your son. I know that you love her dearly, but, Elizabeth—she has become your enemy. She is no mother to you and your sisters anymore. She was providing funds to the men who hope to throw down the Tudor throne; she was giving them advice, sending them messages. She was plotting with Duchess Margaret, who is mustering an army. She was living with us, playing with your child, our precious prince, seeing you daily, and yet working for our destruction.”

I rise from my chair and go to the window. Outside the first swallows of summer are skimming along the surface of the river, twisting and turning in flight, their bellies a flash of cream as if they are glad to be dipping their beaks into their own reflections, playing with the sweet water of the Thames. I turn back. “Lady Margaret, my mother is not dishonorable. And she would never do anything to hurt me.”

Slowly she shakes her head. “She insisted that you marry my son,” she says. “She demanded it, as the price of her loyalty. She was present at the birth of the prince. She was honored at his christening, she is his godmother. We have honored her and housed her and paid her. But now she plots against her own grandson’s inheritance and strives to put another on his throne. This is dishonorable, Elizabeth. You cannot deny that she is playing a double game, a shameful game.”

I put my hands over my face, so that I can shut out her expression. If she looked triumphant I would simply hate her, but she looks horrified, as if she feels, like me, that everything we have been trying to do is going to be pulled apart.

“She and I have not always agreed.” She appeals to me. “But I did not see her leave court with any pleasure. This is a disaster for us as well as for her. I hoped we would make one family, one royal family standing together. But she was always pretending. She has been untrue to us.”

I can’t defend her; I bow my head and a little moan of horror escapes through my gritted teeth.

“She’s not at peace,” Lady Margaret concludes. “She is going on and on fighting the war that you Yorks have lost. She’s not made peace with us, and now she’s at war with you, her own daughter.”

I give a little wail and sink down in the window seat, my hands hiding my face. There is a silence as Lady Margaret crosses the room and seats herself heavily beside me.

“It’s for her son, isn’t it?” she asks wearily. “That’s the only claim she would fight for in preference to yours. That’s the only pretender that she would put against her grandson. She loves Arthur as well as we do, I know that. The only claim she would favor over his would be that of her own son. She must think that one of her boys, Richard or Edward, is still alive and she hopes to put him on the throne.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know!” I am crying now, I can hardly speak. I can hardly hear her through my sobs.

“Well, who is it?” she suddenly shouts, flashing out into rage. “Who else could it be? Who could she put above her own grandson? Who can she prefer to our Prince Arthur? Arthur that was born at Winchester, Arthur of Camelot? Who can she prefer to him?”

Dumbly, I shake my head. I can feel the hot tears pooling in my icy hands and making my face wet.

“She would throw you down for no one else,” Lady Margaret whispers. “Of course it is one of the boys. Tell me, Elizabeth. Tell me all that you know so that we can make your son, Arthur, safe in his inheritance. Does your mother have one of her boys hidden somewhere? Is he with your aunt in Flanders?”

“I don’t know,” I say helplessly. “She would never tell me anything. I said I don’t know, and truly, I don’t know. She made sure that there was never anything that I could tell you. She did not want me ever to have an inquisition like this. She tried to protect me from it, so I don’t know.”

Henry comes to my rooms with his court before dinner, a tight, unconvincing smile on his face, playing the part of a king, trying to hide his fear that he is losing everything.

“I’ll talk with you later,” he says in a hard undertone. “When I come to your room tonight.”

“My lord . . .” I whisper.

“Not now,” he says firmly. “Everyone needs to see that we are united, that we are as one.”

“My mother cannot be held against her will,” I stipulate. I think of my cousin in the Tower, my mother in Bermondsey Abbey. “I cannot tolerate my family being held. Whatever you suspect. I will not bear it.”

“Tonight,” he says. “When I come to your rooms. I’ll explain.”

My cousin Maggie gives me one single aghast look and then comes behind me, picks up my train, and straightens it out as my husband takes my hand and leads me into dinner before the court, and I smile, as I must do, to the left and to the right, and wonder what my mother will have for her dinner tonight, while the court, that once was her court, is merry.

At least Henry comes to me promptly, straight after chapel, dressed for bed, and the lords who escort him to my bedroom quickly withdraw to leave us alone, and my cousin Maggie waits only to see if there is anything that we need, and then she goes too, with one wide-eyed glance at me, as if she fears that next morning I will have disappeared as well.

“I don’t mean your mother to be enclosed,” Henry says briskly. “And I won’t put her on trial if I can avoid it.”

“What has she done?” I demand. I cannot maintain the pretence that she is innocent of everything.

“Do you mean that?” he shoots back at me. “Or are you trying to discover how much I know?”

I give a little exclamation, and turn away from him.

“Sit down, sit down,” he says. He comes after me and takes my hand and leads me to the fireside chair where we used to sit so comfortably. He presses me down into the seat and pats my flushed cheek. For a moment I long to throw myself into his arms and cry on his chest and tell him that I know nothing for sure, but that I fear everything just as he does. That I am torn between love for my mother and my lost brothers, and love for my son. That I cannot be expected to choose the next King of England and finally, most puzzling of all for me, I would give anything in the world to see my beloved brother again and know that he is safe. I would give anything but the throne of England, anything but Henry’s crown.

“I don’t know all of it,” he says, sitting heavily opposite me, his chin on his fist, looking at the flames. “That’s the worst thing: I don’t know all of it. But she has been writing to your aunt Margaret in Flanders, and Margaret is mustering an army against us. Your mother has been in contact with all the old York families, those of her household, those who remember your father or your uncle, calling them to be ready for when Margaret’s army lands. She has been writing to men in exile, to men in hiding. She has been whispering with her sister-in-law, Elizabeth—John de la Pole’s mother. She’s even been visiting your grandmother Duchess Cecily, her mother-in-law. They were at daggers drawn for all of her marriage but now they are in alliance against a greater enemy: me. I know that she was writing to Francis Lovell. I have seen the letters. She was behind his rebellion, I have evidence for that now. I even know how much she sent him to equip his army. It was the money I gave her, the allowance that I granted her. All this I know, I have seen it with my own eyes. I have held her letters in my own hands. There is no doubt.”

He exhales wearily and takes a sip of his drink. I look at him in horror. This evidence is enough to have my mother locked up for the rest of her life. If she were a man, they would behead her for treason.

“That’s not the worst of it,” he goes on grimly. “There is probably more; but I don’t know what else she’s been doing. I don’t know all her allies, I don’t know her most secret plans. I don’t dare to think.”

“Henry, what do you fear?” I whisper. “What do you fear that she has been doing, when you look like this?”

He looks as if he is being harried beyond bearing. “I don’t know what to fear,” he says. “Your aunt the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy is raising an army, a great army against me, I know that much.”

“She is?”

He nods. “And your mother was raising rebels at home. Today I had my council here. I’m in command of the lords, I’m sure of that. At any rate . . . they all swore fealty. But who can I trust if your mother and your aunt put an army in the field, and at the head of it is—” He breaks off.

“Is who?” I ask. “Who do you fear might lead such an invasion?”

He looks away from me. “I think you know.”

I cross the room and take his hand, horrified. “Truly, I don’t know.”

He holds my hand very tightly and stares into my eyes as if trying to read my thoughts, as if he wants more than anything else in the world to know he can trust me, his wife and the mother of his child.

“Do you think John de la Pole would turn his coat and lead the army against you?” I ask, naming my own cousin, Richard’s heir. “Is it him you fear?”

“Do you know anything against him?”

I shake my head. “Nothing, I swear.”

“Worse than him,” he says shortly.

I stand before him in silence, wondering if he will name the enemy that he fears the most: the figurehead who would be more potent than a York cousin.

“Who?” I whisper.

But it is as if the ghost has entered our private room, the ghost that everyone speaks of, but no one dares to name. Superstitiously, Henry will not name him either.

“I’m ready for him,” is all he says. “Whoever it is that she has to head her army. You can tell everyone that I am ready for him.”

“Who?” I dare him to speak.

But Henry just shakes his head.

And then, the very next morning, John de la Pole is missing from the chapel at the service of Lauds. I glance down from my raised seat in the gallery and notice that his usual place is empty. He is missing at dinnertime too.

“Where is my cousin John?” I ask My Lady the King’s Mother as we wait after dinner for the priest to finish the long reading that she has commanded for all the days of Lent.

She looks at me as if I have insulted her. “You ask me?” she says.

“I ask you where is my cousin John?” I repeat, thinking that she has not heard me. “He was not at chapel this morning, and I haven’t seen him all day.”

“You should perhaps ask your mother, rather than me,” she says bitterly. “She may know. You should perhaps ask your aunt Elizabeth of York, his mother—she may know. You should ask your aunt Margaret of York, the false Dowager Duchess of Burgundy: she certainly knows, for he is on his way to her.”

I gasp and put my hand over my mouth. “Are you saying that John de la Pole is going to Flanders? How can you think such a thing?”

“I don’t think it, I know it,” she says. “I would be ashamed to say such a thing if there was any doubt. He is false, as I always said he was. He is false and he sat in our councils and heard our plans for our defense, and heard our fears of rebellion, and now he runs overseas to his aunt to tell her everything we know and everything we fear, and he asks her to put him on our throne, because she is of York, and now he says he is wholly for York, he was always wholly for York—just like you and all your family.”

“John is false?” I repeat. I cannot believe what she is saying. If it is true, then perhaps everything else that they fear is true: perhaps there is an earl, a duke, perhaps even a prince of York somewhere out there, biding his time, planning his campaign. “My cousin John has gone to Flanders?”

“False as a Yorkist,” she says, insulting me to my face. “As false as only a white rose can be, as a white rose always is.”

My Lady the King’s Mother tells me that we will go to Norwich, in the early summer since the king wants to be seen by his people, and take his justice to them. I can tell at once from the strained look in her eyes that this is a lie; but I don’t challenge her. Instead I wait for her to become absorbed in the planning of her son’s progress, and one day at the end of April I announce that I am feeling unwell and will rest in bed. I leave Maggie to guard the door to my bedroom, and to tell people that I am sleeping, and I put on my plainest gown, wrap myself in a dark cloak, and slip down to the pier outside the palace and hail a wherry boat to take me downriver.

It’s cold on the water with a biting wind that gives me an excuse to pull up my hood and wrap a scarf around my face. My groom travels with me, not knowing what we are doing but anxious because he guesses that it is forbidden. The boat goes swiftly with the tide downstream. It will be slower coming back, but I have timed my visit so that the tide will be running inland when we start for Sheen.

The wherry takes me to the abbey’s water stairs and Wes the groom jumps ashore and holds out his hands for me. The boatman promises he will wait to take me back to Sheen, the twinkle in his eyes making it clear that he thinks I am a maid of the court creeping out to meet my lover. I go up the wet steps to the little bridge that spans the watercourse and walk round the walls of the abbey till I come to the main gate and the gatehouse. I pull on the bell and wait for the porter, leaning back against the dark flint and red-brick wall.

A little door inside the great gate opens. “I want to see . . .” I break off. I don’t know what they call my mother now that she is no longer queen, now that she is under suspicion of treason. I don’t even know if she is here under her true name.

“Her Grace the Dowager Queen,” the woman says gruffly, as if Bosworth had never happened, as if Plantagenets still grew green and fresh in the garden of England. She swings open the door for me and lets me in, gesturing that the lad must wait for me outside.

“How did you know I meant her?” I ask.

She smiles at me. “You’re not the first that has come for her, and I doubt you’ll be the last,” she says, and leads me across smooth scythed turf to the cells on the west of the building. “She is a great lady; people will always be loyal to her. She’s at chapel now.” She nods at the church with the graveyard before it. “But you can wait in her cell and she will come in a moment.”

She shows me into a clean whitewashed room, with a bookshelf for my mother’s best-loved volumes, both bound manuscripts and the new print books. There is a crucifix of ivory and gold hanging on the wall, and the little nightgown that she is sewing for Arthur in a box by a chair by the fireside. It is nothing like I had imagined, and for a moment I hesitate on the threshold, weak with relief that my mother is not imprisoned in a cold tower or held in some poor nunnery, but is making her surroundings suit her—as she always does.

Through an inner door I can see her privy chamber and beyond that her curtained bed with her fine embroidered sheets. This is not a woman starving in solitary confinement; my mother is living like a queen in retirement and obviously has the whole nunnery running to her beck and call.

I sink down on a stool at the fireside until I hear a quick step on the paving stone outside and the door opens, and there is my mother, and I am in her arms and I am crying and she is hushing and soothing me and then we are seated by the fireside, and my hands are in hers and she is smiling at me, as she always does, and assuring me that everything will be well.

“But you’re not free to leave?” I confirm.

“No,” she says. “Did you ask Henry for my freedom?”

“Of course, the moment you disappeared. He said no.”

“I thought he would. I have to stay here. For now, at least. How are your sisters?”

“They’re well,” I say. “Catherine and Bridget are in the schoolroom, and I’ve told them that you have gone on a retreat. Bridget wants to join you, of course. She says the vanity of the world is too much for her.”

My mother smiles. “We meant her for the Church,” she says. “She’s always taken it very seriously. And my nephews? John de la Pole?”

“Disappeared,” I say bluntly. Her hands grip me a little tighter.

“Arrested?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Run away,” I say shortly. “I don’t even know if you are telling me the truth when you seem not to know.”

She does not trouble herself to answer me.

“Henry says he has evidence that you are working against us.”

“Us?” she repeats.

“Against the Tudors,” I say, flushing.

“Ah,” she says. “ ‘Us Tudors.’ Do you know what exactly he knows?”

“He knows that you were writing to my aunt Margaret, and calling up York friends. He mentioned my aunt Elizabeth and even my grandmother Duchess Cecily.”

She nods. “Nothing more?”

“Mother, that is more than enough!”

“I know. But you see, Elizabeth, he might know more than this.”

“There is more than this?” I am horrified.

She shrugs. “It’s a conspiracy. Of course there is more than this.”

“Well, that’s all that he told me. Neither he nor his mother trusts me.”

She laughs out loud at that. “They hardly trust their own shadows, why would they trust you?”

“Because I am his wife and queen?”

She nods as if it hardly matters. “And where does he think John de la Pole has gone?”

“Perhaps to My Lady Aunt Margaret in Flanders?”

Clearly, this is no surprise to her. “He got safely away?”

“As far as I know. But Lady Mother—”

She softens at once at the fear in my voice. “Yes, my dear. Of course you are anxious, you will be frightened. But I think that everything is going to change.”

“What about my son?”

“Arthur was born a prince, nobody can take that from him. Nobody would want to.”

“My husband?”

Almost she laughs out loud. “Ah well, Henry was born a commoner,” she says. “Maybe he will die as one.”

“Mother, I cannot have you making war against my husband. We agreed to a peace, you wanted me to marry him. Now we have a son, and he should be the next King of England.”

She rises up and goes in three paces across the small room to look out of the window set high in the wall, to the quiet lawns and little convent church. “Perhaps so. Perhaps he will be king. I have never had a sense of it. I can’t see it myself, but it might happen.”

“Can’t you tell me?” I ask her. “Can’t you tell what’s going to happen?”

She turns and I see that her eyes are veiled and she is smiling. “As a seer, as my mother would have done? Or as a plotter? As a treasonous rebel?”

“As either!” I exclaim. “As anything! Can’t you, can’t someone tell me what is happening?”

She shakes her head. “I can’t be sure,” is all she will say.

“I have to go,” I say irritably. “I have to catch the tide back to Sheen. And then we’re going on progress.”

“Where to?” she asks.

I realize, as I tell her, that she will use this information. She will write to rebels as they muster, to enemies in England and overseas. As soon as I tell her so much as one word, that means I am working for York; I am spying for York against my own husband.

“Norwich,” I say tightly. “We’re going for Corpus Christi. Should I expect an attack now I’ve told you that?”

“Ah, so he thinks we’re invading the east coast,” she says gleefully. “So that’s what he’s expecting.”

“What?”

“He’s not going to Norwich for the pleasure of the feast. He’s going so that he can prepare the east coast for invasion.”

“They will invade? From Flanders?”

She puts a kiss on my forehead, completely ignoring my fearful questions. “Now don’t you worry about it,” she says. “You don’t need to know.”

She walks with me to the gatehouse, and then round the outside walls to where the pier runs out into the Neckinger River and my boat is waiting, bobbing on the rising tide. She kisses me and I kneel for her blessing and feel her warm hand rest gently on my hood. “God bless you,” she says sweetly. “Come and see me when you return from Norwich, if you are able to come, if you are allowed.”

“I’m going to be alone at court without you,” I remind her. “I have Cecily and I have Anne, and Maggie, but I feel alone without you. My little sisters miss you too. And My Lady the King’s Mother thinks I am plotting with you and my husband doubts me. And I have to live there, with them, all of them, being watched by them all the time, without you.”

“Not for long,” she says, her buoyant confidence unchanged. “And very soon you will come to me or—who knows—I will find a way to come to you.”

We get back to Richmond on the inflowing tide and as soon as we round the bend in the river I can see a tall slight figure waiting on the landing stage. It is the king. It is Henry. I recognize him from far away, and I don’t know whether to tell the wherry to just turn around and row away, or to go on. I should have known that he would know where I was. My uncle Edward warned me that this is a king who knows everything. I should have known that he would not accept the lie of illness without questioning my cousin Margaret, and demanding to see me.

His mother is not at his side, nor any of his court. He is standing alone like an anxious husband, not like a suspicious king. As the little boat nudges up against the wooden pilings and my groom jumps ashore, Henry puts him to one side and helps me out of the boat himself. He throws a coin to the boatman, who rings it against his teeth as if surprised to find that it is good, and then disappears into the mist of the twilight river.

“You should have told me you wanted to go and I would have sent you more comfortably on the barge,” Henry says shortly.

“I am sorry. I thought you would not want me to visit.”

“And so you thought you would get out and back without my knowing?”

I nod. There is no point denying it. Obviously I had hoped that he would not know. “Because you don’t trust me,” he says flatly. “Because you don’t think that I would let you visit her, if it was safe for you to do so. You prefer to deceive me and creep out like a spy to meet my enemy in secret.”

I say nothing. He tucks my hand into the crook of his elbow as if we were a loving husband and wife, and he makes me walk, stride by stride, with him.

“And did you find your mother comfortably housed? And well?”

I nod. “Yes. I thank you.”

“And did she tell you what she has been doing?”

“No.” I hesitate. “She tells me nothing. I told her that we were going to Norwich, I hope that wasn’t wrong?”

For a moment his hard gaze at me is softened, as if he is sorry for the tearing apart of my loyalties; but then he speaks bitterly. “No. It doesn’t matter. She will have other spies set around me as well as you. She probably knew already. What did she ask you?”

It is like a nightmare, reviewing my conversation with my mother and wondering what will incriminate her, or even incriminate me. “Almost nothing,” I answer. “She asked me if John de la Pole had left court, and I said yes.”

“Did she hazard a guess as to why he had gone? Did she know where he had gone?”

I shake my head. “I told her that it was thought that he has gone to Flanders,” I confess.

“Did she not know already?”

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Was he expected?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will his family follow him, do you think? His brother Edmund? His mother, Elizabeth, your aunt? His father? Are they all faithless, though I have trusted them and taken them into my court and listened to their counsels? Will they just take note of everything I said and take it to their kinsmen, my enemies?”

I shake my head again. “I don’t know.”

He releases my hand to step back and look at me, his dark eyes unsmiling and suspicious, his face hard. “When I think of the fortune that was spent on your education, Elizabeth, I am really amazed at how little you know.”

ST. MARY’S IN THE FIELDS, NORWICH, SUMMER 1487

The court travels east on muddy roads and we celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi at Norwich, and we stay at the chapel of the college of St. Mary’s in the Fields and go into the wealthy town to observe the procession of the guilds to the cathedral.

The town is the richest in the kingdom, and every guild based on the wool business dresses up in the finest robes and pays for costumes, scenery, and horses to make a massive procession with merchants, masters, and apprentices in solemn order to celebrate the feast of the church and their own importance.

I stand beside Henry, both in our best robes as we watch the long procession, each guild headed by a gorgeously embroidered banner and a litter carrying a display to celebrate their work or show their patron saint. Now and then I can see Henry glance sideways at me. He is watching me as the guilds go by. “You smile at someone when he catches your eye,” he says suddenly.

I am surprised. “Just out of courtesy,” I say defensively. “It means nothing.”

“No, I know. It’s just that you look at them as if you wish them well; you smile in a friendly way.”

I cannot understand what he is saying. “Yes, of course, my lord. I’m enjoying the procession.”

“Enjoying it?” he queries as if this explains everything. “You like this?”

I nod, though he makes me feel almost guilty to have a moment of pleasure. “Who would not? It’s so rich and varied, and the tableaux so well made, and the singing! I don’t think I’ve ever heard such music.”

He shakes his head in impatience at himself, and then remembers everyone is watching us and raises a hand to a passing litter with a splendid castle built out of gold-painted wood. “I can’t just enjoy it,” he says. “I keep thinking that these people put on this show, but what are they thinking in their hearts? They might smile and wave at us and doff their hats, but do they truly accept my rule?”

A little child, dressed as a cherub, waves at me from a pillow of white on blue, representing a cloud. I smile and blow him a kiss, which makes him wriggle with delight.

“But you just enjoy it,” Henry says, as if pleasure was a puzzle to him.

I laugh. “Ah well,” I say. “I was raised in a happy court and my father loved nothing better than a joust or a play or a celebration. We were always making music and dancing. I can’t help but enjoy a spectacle, and this is as fine as anything I have ever seen.”

“You forget your worries?” he asks me.

I consider. “For a moment I do. D’you think that makes me very foolish?”

Ruefully, he smiles. “No. I think you were born and raised to be a merry woman. It is a pity that so much sorrow has come into your life.”

There is a roar of cannon, in salute from the castle, and I see Henry flinch at the noise, and then grit his teeth and master himself.

“Are you well, my lord husband?” I ask him quietly. “Clearly you’re not easily amused like me.”

The face he turns to me is pale. “Troubled,” he says shortly, and I remember with a sudden pulse of dread that my mother said that the court was at Norwich because Henry expects an invasion on the east coast, and that I have been smiling and waving like a fool while my husband fears for his life.

We follow the procession into the great cathedral for the solemn mass of Corpus Christi, where My Lady the King’s Mother drops to her knees the moment that we enter, and spends the entire two-hour service bent low. Her more devout ladies-in-waiting kneel behind her, as if they were all part of an order of exceptional devotion. I think of my mother naming My Lady as Madonna Margaret of the Unending Self-Congratulation, and have to compose my face into a serious expression as I sit beside my husband on a pair of great matching chairs and listen to the long service in Latin and watch the service of the Mass.

Today, as it is such an important feast day, we will take communion and Henry and I go side by side up to the altar, my ladies following me, his court following him. At the moment that he is offered the sacred bread I see him hesitate, for one revealing second, before he opens his mouth and takes it, and I realize this is the only time that he does not have a taster to make sure his food is not poisoned. The thought that he might close his lips to the Host, to the sacred bread of the Mass, the body of Christ Himself, makes me shut my eyes in horror. When it is my turn, the wafer is dry in my mouth at that thought. How can Henry be so afraid that he thinks he is in danger before the altar of a cathedral?

The chancel rail is cold beneath my forehead as I kneel to pray and I remember that the church is no longer a place of holy safety. Henry has pulled his enemies out of sanctuary and put them to death; why should he not be poisoned at the altar?

I walk back to my throne, past My Lady the King’s Mother, who is still on her knees, and know that her anguished expression is because she is praying earnestly for her son’s safety in this country that he has won, but cannot trust.

When the service is over we go to a great banquet in the castle, and there are mummers and dancers, a pageant and a choir. Henry sits on his great chair at the head of the hall and smiles, and eats well. But I see his brown gaze raking the room, and the way that his hand is always clenched on the arm of his chair.

We stay on in Norwich after Corpus Christi and the court makes merry in the sunny weather; but I soon realize that Henry is planning something. He has men at every port along the coast appointed to warn him of foreign shipping. He organizes a series of beacons that are to be lit if a fleet is sighted. Every morning he has men brought into his room by a private covered way directly leading from the stable yard to the big plain room he has taken for his councils. Nobody knows who they are, but we all see sweat-stained horses in the stables, and men who will not stop to dine in the great hall, who have no time for singing or drinking but say that they will get their meat on the road. When the stable lads ask them, “Which road?” they won’t say.

Suddenly, Henry announces that he is going on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, a full day’s ride north. He will go without me to this holy shrine.

“Is there something wrong?” I ask him. “Don’t you want me to come with you?”

“No,” he says shortly. “I’ll go alone.”

Our Lady of Walsingham is famous for helping barren women. I cannot think why Henry would suddenly want to make a pilgrimage there.

“Will you take your mother? I can’t understand why you would want to go.”

“Why shouldn’t I go to a holy shrine?” he asks irritably. “I’m always observing saints’ days. We’re a devout family.”

“I know, I know,” I placate him. “I just thought it was odd. Will you go quite alone?”

“I’ll take only a few men. I’ll ride with the Duke of Suffolk.”

The duke is my uncle, married to my father’s sister Elizabeth, and the father of my missing cousin John de la Pole. This only makes me more uneasy.

“As a companion? You choose the Duke of Suffolk as your principal companion to go on pilgrimage?”

Henry shows me a wolfish smile. “What else but as my companion? He has always been so faithful and loyal to me. Why would I not want to ride with him?”

I have no answer to this question. Henry’s expression is sly.

“Is it to speak to him about his son?” I venture. “Are you going to question him?” I cannot help but be anxious for my uncle. He is a quiet, steady man who fought for Richard at Bosworth but sought and obtained a pardon from Henry. His father was a famous Lancastrian, but he has always been devoted to the House of York, married to a York duchess. “I am certain, I am absolutely certain that he knows nothing about his son John’s running away.”

“And what does John de la Pole’s mother know? And what does your mother know?” Henry demands.

When I am silent he laughs shortly. “You are right to be anxious. I feel that I can trust none of the York cousins. Do you think I am taking your uncle as a hostage for the good behavior of his son? D’you think I’m going to take him away from everyone and remind him that he has another son and that the whole family might easily go on from Walsingham to the Tower? And from there to the block?”

I look at my husband and fear this icy fury of his. “Don’t speak of the Tower and the block,” I say quietly. “Please don’t speak of such things to me.”

“Don’t give me cause.”

ST. MARY’S IN THE FIELDS, NORWICH, SUMMER 1487

Henry and my uncle Suffolk go on their pilgrimage and come home again, no worse for wear but certainly not visibly spiritually blessed. Henry says nothing about the journey and my uncle is similarly silent. I have to assume that my husband questioned and perhaps threatened my uncle, and he—a man accustomed to living in dangerous proximity to the throne—answered well enough to keep himself and his wife and other children safe. Where his eldest son, John de la Pole, has gone, what my handsome cousin is doing in exile, nobody knows for sure.

Then, one evening, Henry comes to my room, not dressed for bed but in his day clothes, his lean face compressed and dark. “The Irish have run mad,” he says shortly.

I am at the window, looking out over the darkening garden to the river. Somewhere out in the darkness I can hear the loving call of a barn owl, and I am looking for the flash of a white wing. His mate hoots in reply as I turn and take in the strain in my husband’s hunched shoulders, the grayness of his face. “You look so tired,” I say. “Can’t you rest at all?”

“Tired? I am driven half to my grave by these people. What d’you think they have done now?”

I shake my head, close the shutters on the peace of the garden, and turn to him. For a moment I feel a whisper of irritation that he cannot be at peace, that we are always under siege from his fears. “Who? Who now?”

He looks at the paper in his hand. “Those I mistrusted—rightly as it turns out—and those that I had not even known about. My kingdom is cursed with English traitors. I hadn’t even thought about the Irish. I haven’t even had time to go among them and meet them; but already they are gone to the bad.”

“Who is treacherous?” I try to ask with a light voice, but I can feel my throat tightening with fear. My family have always been well loved in Ireland; it will be our friends and allies who are frightening Henry. “Who is treacherous and what are they doing?”

“Your cousin John de la Pole is false as I thought he was, though his father swore he was not. As we rode together he looked me straight in the eye and lied like a tinker. John de la Pole has done what his father swore he would not do. He went straight to the court of Margaret of York in Flanders and she is supporting him. Now he’s gone to Dublin.”

“Dublin?”

“With Francis Lovell.”

I gasp. “Francis Lovell again?”

Henry nods grimly. “They met at the court of your aunt. All of Europe knows she will support any enemy of mine. She is determined to see York back on the throne of England and she has the command of her stepdaughter’s fortune and the friendship of half of the crowned heads of Europe. She is the most powerful woman in Christendom, a terrible enemy for me. And she has no reason! No reason to persecute me . . .”

“John did go to her, then?”

“I knew at once,” Henry said. “I have a spy in every port in England. Nobody can come or go without me knowing it within two days. I knew that his father was lying when he said he had probably run to France. I knew that your mother was lying when she said that she could not say. I knew that you were lying when you said you did not know.”

“But I didn’t know!”

He does not even hear me. “But there is worse. The duchess has put a great army at their disposal and someone has made them a pretender.”

“Made them?” I repeat.

“Like a mummer’s dummy. They’ve made a boy.” He looks at my aghast face. “She’s got herself a boy.”

“A boy?”

“A boy of the right age, and the right looks. A boy that can serve.”

“Serve as what?”

“A York heir.”

I can feel myself grow weak at the knees. I steady myself on the stone windowsill and feel the chill under the palm of my sweating hand. “Who? What boy?”

He comes behind me as if he wants to hold me with love. He wraps his arms around my waist and holds me close, my back pressed to him, bending his head to whisper against my hair as if he would inhale the smell of treason on my breath. “A boy who calls himself Richard. A boy who says he is your missing brother: Richard of York.”

My knees give way and he holds me up for a moment and then lifts me like a lover, but dumps me, ungently, on the bed. “It’s not possible,” I stammer, struggling to sit upright. “How is it possible?”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t know, you little traitor!” He explodes into one of his sudden rages. “Don’t look at me with your beautiful innocent face and tell me you knew nothing of this. Don’t look at me with those clear eyes and lie to me from that pretty mouth. When I look at you I think that you must be an honorable woman, I think that no one as beautiful as a saint could be such a spy. D’you really expect me to believe that your mother didn’t tell you? That you don’t know?”

“Know what? I don’t know anything,” I say urgently. “I swear that I know nothing.”

“Anyway, he’s changed his tune.” Henry abruptly drops into a chair by the fireside and puts his hand to shade his eyes. He looks exhausted by his own outburst. “He was your brother Richard only for a few days. Now he says he’s Edward. It’s like being challenged by a shape-shifter. Who is he anyway?”

I have a sudden pang of wild hope. “Edward? Edward, my brother? Edward, Prince of Wales?”

“No. Edward of Warwick, your cousin. It’s a pity you have such a big family.”

My head swims, and for a moment I close my eyes and take a breath. When I look up I see he is watching me, as if he would read every secret that I know, by staring at my face.

“You think that Edward your brother is alive!” he accuses me, his voice hard with suspicion. “All this time you have been hoping that he will come. When I spoke of a pretender then, you thought it might be him!”

I fold my lips together, shaking my head. “How could he be?”

He is horrified. “I was asking you.”

I draw a breath. “Surely, no one can think that this boy is my cousin, Edward of Warwick. Everyone knows that Edward of Warwick is in the Tower. We showed him to everyone. You made sure that he was seen by all of London.”

He smiles grimly. “Yes. I had him walk side by side with John de la Pole, my friend and ally. But now John de la Pole who knelt at Mass beside the real Edward has taken a boy he claims is Edward to Ireland. The very show that we put on to tell everyone that Edward of Warwick was in London they are repeating, to tell everyone that he is in Ireland, summoning an army. John de la Pole walked with this boy to Dublin Cathedral, Elizabeth. They took him to the cathedral and they crowned him king of Ireland, England, and France. They have taken a boy and made him king. They put the crown on his head. They have set up a rival king to me and they have touched him with the sacred oil. They have crowned a new King of England. A York king. What d’you think of that?”

I grip the embroidered cover on the bed as if to hold myself in the real world and not drift away into this illusion laid upon illusion. “Who is he? In real life? This boy?”

“It’s not your brother Edward. And it’s not your brother Richard, if that’s what you’re hoping,” he says spitefully. “I have spies all over this country. I found the true birth of this boy ten days ago. He’s a nothing, a common lad that some priest has coached for the part, for spite. The priest will be some sort of malevolent old trickster who longs for the old days again, who wants the Yorks back. Your mother must see ten of them a day and give half of them the pension that I pay to her. But this one matters. He’s not acting alone. Someone has paid him to put this lad up as a pretend prince so that the people will rise for him. When he wins, they bring out the real prince, and he takes the throne.”

“When he wins?” I repeat the betraying words.

“If he wins.” He shakes his head as if to resist the dangerous vision of defeat. “It’ll be close. He has a good-sized army paid for by your aunt the duchess and by others of your family: your mother of course, your aunt Elizabeth I suspect, your grandmother for certain. He has mustered the Irish clans and my uncle Jasper tells me they are wild fighters. And, we shall see: he may have the support of the people of England. Who knows? When he raises the standard of the ragged staff they may turn out for him. When he cries, À Warwick, they may answer for old times’ sake. They may be all for him. Perhaps they have tried me and find me wanting; now they want a return to the familiar, like a dog eating its vomit.” He looks at me, as I sit in a heap on the bed. “What d’you think? What would your mother say? Can a York pretender command England still? Will they all turn out for a counterfeit prince under the standard of the white rose?”

“They will bring out the real prince?” It is what he said. It is what he himself said. “The real prince?”

He doesn’t even answer me, his mouth twisted in a sort of snarl, as if he has no means to explain what he has just said.

We fall silent for a moment.

“What will you do?” It comes out as a whisper.

“I shall have to muster all the troops I can, and get ready for another battle,” he says bitterly. “I thought I had won this country but—rather like being married to you, perhaps—a man can never be quite sure that the job is done. I won a great battle and was crowned king here, and now they have crowned another and I have to fight again. It seems I can be sure of nothing in this country of mists and cousins.”

“And what will they do?” I whisper.

He looks at me as if he hates me, me and all of my unreliable family. “When they win, they’ll change boys.”

“Change boys?”

“This pretender will slip away, and a real boy will take his place, step up to the throne. A boy who is safe in hiding now, biding his time, waiting to be embodied.”

“Embodied?”

“Out of thin air. Back from the dead.”

“Who?”

Spitefully, he mimicks my horrified whisper, “Who?” and goes to the door of my room. “Who d’you think? Or should that be, who do you know?” When I say nothing he laughs shortly, with no humor. “So I will bid you farewell now, my beautiful wife, and hope that I will return to your warm bed as King of England.”

“What else?” I ask stupidly. “What else could you be?”

“Dead, I suppose,” he says bleakly.

I slide off the bed and step towards him, stretching out my hands. He takes them but does not draw me close. He holds me at arm’s length and scrutinizes my face for deceit.

“D’you think the duchess has your brother Richard in hiding?” he asks me, matter-of-factly, as if it is a question of mild interest. “The trophy of a long plot between her and your mother? D’you think your mother sent him to her the moment that he was in danger, and sent a pretend prince into the Tower? D’you think he has been there for these four years? A pretender waiting for the battle to be fought for him, before he springs out, triumphant? Like Jesus from the tomb? Naked but for his winding sheet and his vanquished wounds? Triumphing over death and then me?”

I can’t meet his eyes. “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know anything. Before God, Henry—”

He checks me. “Don’t be forsworn,” he says. “I have men swearing lies to me ten times a day. All I wanted from you was the simple truth.”

I stand before him in silence, and he nods as if he knows there can never be a simple truth between us, and he goes out.

COVENTRY CASTLE, SUMMER 1487

Henry tells his mother and me that we are to act in his absence as if we are on a royal progress, enjoying the early summer weather, free of worries. We order musicians and plays, dancing and pageants. There is to be a joust, the lords are to gather with us at Coventry as if for revels. But they are to bring their men, clothed, booted, and armed for war, ready for an invasion from Ireland. We are to demonstrate confidence while secretly preparing for war.

My Lady the King’s Mother cannot do it. She cannot act as queen of a happy court when every day another rider comes from Ireland with more bad news. John de la Pole and Francis Lovell have landed in Ireland with a massive trained force of two thousand men. My Lady walks everywhere with her rosary in her hands, telling her beads and whispering prayers for the safe deliverance of her son from danger.

We learn that, just as Henry told me privately, they have crowned a boy king in Dublin and declared that he is Edward of Warwick and the true king of England, Ireland, and France.

My Lady stops speaking to me; she can hardly bear to be in the same room as me. I may be her daughter-in-law, but she can only see me as the daughter of the house that has raised up this threat, whose aunt Margaret is pouring money and weapons into Ireland, whose aunt Elizabeth provided the commander, whose mother is masterminding the plot from behind the high walls of Bermondsey Abbey. She will not speak to me, she cannot bear to look at me. Only once in this difficult time she stops me as I walk past her rooms with my sisters and my cousin on my way to the stables for our horses. She puts her hand on my arm as I walk by, and I drop a curtsey to her and wait for what she has to say.

“You know, don’t you?” she demands. “You know where he is. You know he is alive.”

I cannot answer her white-faced fears. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know very well what I mean!” she spits furiously. “You know he’s alive. You know where he is. You know what they plan for him!”

“Shall I call your ladies?” I ask her. The hand that grips my arm is shaking, I really fear that she is going to fall down in a fit. Her gaze, always intense, is fixed on my face, as if she would force her way into my mind. “My Lady, shall I call your ladies and help you to your rooms?”

“You’ve fooled my son, but you don’t fool me!” she hisses. “And you will see that I command here, and that everyone who has treasonous thoughts, high or low, will be punished. Treasonous heads will be cut from their corrupt bodies. High and low, nobody will be spared at Judgment Day. The sheep will be parted from the goats, and the unclean will go down to hell.”

Cecily is staring at her godmother, quite horrified. She steps forwards, and then she shrinks back from the woman’s anguished dark glare.

“Ah,” I say coldly. “I misunderstood you. You are speaking of this pretender in Ireland? And whether you command here, or whether you have to flee from here in terror, we will know very soon, I am sure.”

At the very word “flee,” she tightens her grip and sways on her feet. “Are you my enemy? Tell me, let us have honesty between us. Are you my enemy? Are you the enemy of my beloved son?”

“I am your daughter-in-law and the mother of your grandchild,” I say as quietly as her. “This is what you wanted and this is what you have. Whether I love him or hate him, that is between ourselves. Whether I love you or hate you, that was your doing too. And I think you know the answer.”

She flings my hand away as if my touch is repellent. “I will see you destroyed the day that you raise him up against us,” she warns me.

“Raise him up?” I repeat furiously. “Raise him up? It sounds like you think we would raise the dead! What can you mean? Who do you fear, My Lady?”

She gives a racking sob and she gulps down an answer. I sweep her the smallest curtsey, and I go on my way to the stables. I duck into my horse’s stall and slam the stable door behind me to rest my head against his warm neck. I take a shuddering breath and realize that she has told me that they believe my brother is alive.

KENILWORTH CASTLE, WARWICKSHIRE, JUNE 1487

The court gives up the pretence that we are enjoying the summer, staying in the midlands of England for the beauty of the forests and the quality of the hunting. The news comes that the Irish army has landed and is sweeping across the country. The Irish troops travel light, like savage marauders. The German mercenaries who have been paid to win England back for York march at speed, earning their bounty. Duchess Margaret has hired the very best, commanded by a brilliant soldier. Every day another spy, another lookout, comes riding into court and says that they have gone past like an unstoppable wave. They are disciplined, they march with scouts before them and no baggage train trailing behind. There are hundreds of them, thousands, and at the head is a boy, a child, Edward of Warwick, and he marches under the royal standard and the ragged staff. They have crowned him King of England and Ireland. They call him king and he is served on bended knee and everywhere he goes people come out into the streets and shout, “À Warwick!”

I hardly see Henry, who is closeted with his uncle Jasper and John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, forever sending messages to the lords, trying their loyalty, asking them to come to him. Many, very many, take their time in replying. Nobody wants to declare as a rebel too soon; but equally, nobody wants to be on the losing side with a new king. Everyone remembers that Richard looked unbeatable when he rode out from Leicester, and yet a small paid army confronted him, and a traitor cut him down. The lords who promised their support to that king, and yet sat on their horses and watched for the outcome on the day of battle, may decide to be bystanders once again and intervene only on the winning side.

Henry comes to my rooms only once during this anxious time, with a letter in his hand. “I will tell you this myself so that you don’t hear it from a York traitor,” he says unpleasantly.

I rise to my feet and my ladies melt away from my husband’s temper. They have learned, we have all learned, to keep out of the way of the Tudors, mother and son, when they are pale with fear. “Your Grace?” I say steadily.

“The King of France has chosen this moment, this very moment, to release your brother Thomas Grey.”

“Thomas!”

“He writes that he will come to support me,” Henry says bitterly. “You know, I don’t think we’ll risk that. When Thomas was last supporting me on the road to Bosworth, he changed his mind and turned his coat before we even left France. Who knows what he would have done on the battlefield? But they’re releasing him now. Just in time for another battle. What d’you think I should do?”

I hold on to the back of a chair so that my hands don’t tremble. “If he gives you his word . . .” I begin.

He laughs at me. “His word!” he says scathingly. “The York word! Would that be as binding as your mother’s word of honor? Or your cousin John’s? Your marriage vows?”

I start to stammer a reply but he puts up his hand for silence. “I’ll hold him in the Tower. I don’t want his help, and I don’t trust him free. I don’t want him talking to his mother, and I don’t want him seeing you.”

“He could . . .”

“No, he couldn’t.”

I take a breath. “May I at least write and tell my mother that her son, my half brother, is coming home?”

He laughs, a jeering unconvincing laugh. “D’you think she won’t know already? D’you think she has not paid his ransom and commanded his return?”

I write to my mother at Bermondsey Abbey. I leave the letter unsealed for I know that Henry or his mother or his spies will open it and read it anyway.

My dear Lady Mother,

I greet you well.

I write to tell you that your son Thomas Grey has been released from France and has offered his service to the king, who has decided, in his wisdom, to hold my half brother in safekeeping in the Tower of London for the time being.

I am in good health, as is your grandson.

Elizabeth

P.S. Arthur is crawling everywhere and pulling himself up on chairs so that he can stand. He’s very strong and proud of himself, but he can’t walk yet.

Henry says he must leave me and the ladies of the court, our son Arthur with his own yeomen of the guard in his nursery, and his frantically anxious mother behind the strong walls of Kenilworth Castle, muster his army, and march out. I walk with him to the great entrance gate of the castle, where his army is drawn up in battle array, behind their two great commanders: his uncle Jasper Tudor and his most reliable friend and ally, the Earl of Oxford. Henry looks tall and powerful in his armor, reminding me of my father, who always rode out to battle in the absolute certainty that he would win.

“If it goes against us, you should withdraw to London,” Henry says tightly. I can hear the fear in his voice. “Get yourself into sanctuary. Whoever they put on the throne will be your kinsman. They won’t hurt you. But guard our son. He’ll be half a Tudor. And please . . .” He breaks off. “Be merciful to my mother, see that they spare her.”

“I’m never going into sanctuary again,” I say flatly. “I’m not raising my son inside four dark rooms.”

He takes my hand. “Save yourself at any rate,” he says. “Go to the Tower. Whether they put Edward of Warwick on the throne or whether they have someone else . . .”

I don’t even ask him who else they might have to serve as a prince for York.

He shakes his head. “Nobody can tell me who might be in hiding, waiting for this moment. I have enemies but I don’t even know if they are alive or dead. I feel that I am looking for ghosts, that an army of ghosts is coming for me.” He pauses and composes himself. “At any rate, whoever they are, they are of the House of York and you will be safe with them. Our son will be safe with you. And you will give me your word that you will protect my mother?”

“You are preparing to lose?” I ask incredulously. I take his hands and I can feel the tight sinews in his fingers; he is rigid with anxiety from head to toe.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Nobody can know. If the country rises up for them then we will be outnumbered. The Irish will fight to the death and the mercenaries are well paid and have pledged themselves to this. All I have now is the men who will stand by me. My army at Bosworth has been paid off and gone home. And I can’t inspire a new army with the promise of fresh gains, or rewards. If the rebels have a true prince to put at their head, then I am probably lost.”

“A true prince?” I repeat.

We step out of the shadow of the great arch of the portcullis gate and his army raises a deep cheer as they see him. Henry waves at them and then turns to me.

“I shall kiss you,” he warns me, to ensure that we make an encouraging picture for his men. He puts his arms around me and he draws me to him. His light battle armor is hard against me; it is like hugging a man of metal. I look up into his scowling face and he brings his head down and kisses me. For a moment, uncomfortably pinioned in his arms, I am overwhelmed with pity for him.

“God bless you, my husband, and bring you safe home to me,” I say shakily.

There is a roar of pleasure from the army at the kiss, but he does not even hear it. His attention is all on me. “You mean it? I go with your blessing?”

“You do,” I say in sudden earnestness. “You do. And I shall pray that you come safely home to me. And I shall guard our son, and I shall protect your mother.”

For a moment he looks as if he would stay and speak with me. As if he wants to speak gently and truthfully to me, for the first time ever. “I have to go,” he says unwillingly.

“You go,” I say. “Send me news as soon as you can. I shall be looking for news from you, and praying that it is good.”

They bring his great warhorse, and they help him into the saddle, his standard bearer riding up beside him so the white and green flag with the Tudor red dragon ripples out over his head. The other flag is unfurled: the royal standard. Last time I saw that above an army, the man I loved, Richard, rode beneath it; and I put my hand to my heart to ease the sudden thud of pain.

“God bless you, my wife,” Henry says, but I have no smile for him anymore. He is riding the warhorse he rode at Bosworth when he stood on a hill and Richard rode to his death. He is under the Tudor flag he unfurled there, that Richard cut down in his last fatal charge.

I raise my hand to say farewell, but I am choked, and can’t repeat my blessing, and Henry wheels his horse around and leads his army out, east to where his spies tell him the great York army has taken up their position, just beyond Newark.

KENILWORTH CASTLE, WARWICKSHIRE, 17 JUNE 1487

The ladies gather in my chamber to wait for news without the king’s mother, who is on her knees in the beautiful Kenilworth chapel. We can hear a horseman on the road, and then the grinding noise of the portcullis going up and the drawbridge coming down to admit him. Cecily flies to the window and cranes her neck to look out. “A messenger,” she says. “The king’s messenger.”

I rise to my feet to wait for him, then I realize that My Lady will intercept him before he gets to me, so I say, “Wait here!” to my ladies and slip from the room and down the stairs to the stable yard. Just as I thought, My Lady is there in her black gown striding across the yard, as the messenger swings down from the saddle.

“I was told to report to you and to Her Grace the Queen,” he is saying.

“The king’s wife,” she corrects him. “She is not yet crowned. You can tell me everything, I will pass on the news to her.”

“I’m here,” I say quickly. “I’ll hear him myself. What’s the news?”

He turns to me. “It started badly,” he says. “They recruited as they marched. They marched fast, faster than we thought they could have gone. The Irishmen are lightly armed, they carry almost nothing, the German soldiers are unstoppable.”

My Lady the King’s Mother blanches white and totters slightly, as if she will faint. But I have received messengers from battles before. “Never mind all that,” I say sharply. “Tell me the end of the message, not the beginning. Is the king alive or dead?”

“Alive,” he says.

“Did he win?”

“His commanders won.”

I disregard this too. “Are the Irish and the German mercenaries defeated?”

He nods.

“John de la Pole?”

“Dead.”

I take a breath at the death of my cousin.

“And Francis Lovell?” My Lady interrupts eagerly.

“Run away. Probably drowned in the river.”

“Now, you can tell me how it was,” I say.

This is the speech he has prepared. “They marched fast,” he says. “Past York, had a few running battles, but drew up at a village called East Stoke, outside Newark. People came out to support them, and they were recruiting right up to the last moment before the battle.”

“How many were they?” My Lady demands.

“We thought about eight thousand.”

“How many men did the king have by then?”

“We were twice their number. We should have felt safe. But we did not.” He shakes his head at the memory of their fear. “We did not.

“Anyway, they charged early, down from the hill, almost as soon as the battle began, and so all of them came against the Earl of Oxford who was commanding about six thousand men. He took the brunt of the fighting and his men held firm. They pushed back, and forced the Irish into a valley, and they couldn’t get out.”

“They were trapped?” I ask.

“We think they decided to fight to the death. They call the valley the Red Gutter now. It was very bad.”

I turn my head from the thought of it. “Where was the king during this massacre?”

“Safely in the rear of his army.” The messenger nods to his mother, who sees no shame in this. “But they brought the pretender to him when it was over.”

“He’s safe?” My Lady confirms. “You are certain that the king is safe?”

“Safe as ever.”

I swallow an exclamation. “And who is the pretender?” I ask as calmly as possible.

The man looks at me curiously. I realize I am gritting my teeth, and I try to breathe normally. “Is he a poor imposter as my lord thought?”

“Lambert Simnel: a lad trained to do the bidding of others, a schoolboy from Oxford, a handsome boy. His Grace has him under arrest, and the schoolmaster who taught him, and many of the other leaders.”

“And Francis Lovell?” My Lady demands, her voice hard. “Did anyone see him drown?”

He shakes his head. “His horse plunged into the river with him and they were swept away together.”

I cross myself. My Lady Mother makes the sign but her face is dark. “We had to capture him,” she says. “We had to take him and John de la Pole alive. We had to know what they planned. It was essential. We had to have them so that we could know what they know.”

“The heat of the battle . . .” The man shrugs. “It’s harder to capture a man than to kill him. It was a close thing. Even though we outnumbered them by so many, it was a very close thing. They fought like men possessed. They were ready to die for their cause and we were—”

“You were what?” I ask curiously.

“We did as we were ordered,” he says carefully. “We did enough. We did the job.”

I pause at that. I have heard reports from many battles, though none in which the victory was described so calmly. But then I have never heard a report from a battle where the chief commander, the king himself, sat at the rear of his army, an army twice the size of his enemy, and refused to parlay with defeated men but let them be slaughtered like dumb cattle.

“But they’re dead,” My Lady says to comfort herself. “And my son is alive.”

“He’s well. Not a scratch on him. How could they touch him? He was so far back they couldn’t see him!”

“You can dine in the hall,” My Lady rules, “and this is for you.” I see a piece of gold pass from her hand to his. She must be grateful for the good news to pay so highly for it. She turns to me. “So it is over.”