The White Princess

“Praise be to God,” I say devoutly.

She nods. “His will be done,” she says, and I know that this victory will make her more certain than ever that her son was born to be king.

LINCOLN CASTLE, LINCOLN, JULY 1487

The king commands that we meet him at Lincoln and he and I go hand in hand into the great cathedral for a service of thanksgiving. Behind us, half a step behind, wearing a coronal, like a queen herself, comes My Lady the King’s Mother and either side of her are the king’s commanders, his uncle Jasper Tudor, who planned the battle, and his most loyal friend, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, whose men took the brunt of the fighting.

The archbishop, John Morton, is trembling at the nearness of the escape, his face flushed, his hands shaking as he distributes the Host. My Lady is in floods of tears of joy. Henry himself is profoundly moved, as if this is his first victory, fought all over again. Winning this means more to him than winning at Bosworth; it doubles his confidence.

“I am relieved,” he says to me when we are in our private room at the end of the day. “I cannot easily say how deeply I am relieved.”

“Because you won?” I ask. I am sitting at the window, looking east where the high spires of the cathedral pierce the low cloudy skies, but as he comes in my room I turn and look at his flushed complexion.

“Not just that,” he says. “Once I knew that we outnumbered them I thought we were almost certain to win, and the Irish were practically unarmed—when they turned and faced us they were all but naked. I knew they couldn’t stand against archery—they had no shields, they had no padded jackets, nobody had chain mail, poor fools—no, what made it so wonderful was capturing the boy.”

“The boy they said was my cousin Teddy?”

“Yes, because now I can show him. Now everyone can see that he is no heir to York. He’s a schoolboy, a lad of ten years old, name of Lambert Simnel, nothing special about him but his looks . . .” He glances at me. “Handsome, charming, like all the Yorks.”

I nod as if this is a reasonable complaint against us.

“And better than that.” He smiles to himself, he is all but hugging himself with joy. “No one else landed, no one else came. Even though they marched all the way across England, there was no one anchored off the east coast, there was no one waiting for them at Newark.”

“What d’you mean?”

He gets to his feet and stretches himself as if he would spread his arms to hug all of the kingdom. “If they had a pretender, a better likeness than the little schoolboy, they would have had him nearby, waiting. So that when they claimed victory they could produce him, exchange him for the little lad, and take him to London for a second coronation.”

I wait.

“Like with players!” He is almost laughing with joy. “When they make a switch in a play. Like the Easter play—there’s the body in the tomb, someone flicks a cape and there’s the risen Lord. You have to have your switch ready, you have to have your player in the wings. But when they didn’t have a boy waiting to take the place of the Simnel lad—that’s when I knew that they were defeated. They don’t have anyone!” He cracks into a laugh. “See? They don’t have anyone. Nobody was landed to meet them at Newark. Nobody came in from Flanders, nobody sailed up the Thames and arrived in London to wait for the triumphant procession. Nobody arrived in Wales, nobody came down from Scotland. Don’t you see?” He laughs in my face. “All they have is an impersonator, the schoolboy. They don’t have the real thing.”

“The real thing?”

In his relief he speaks his fear clearly for the first time. “They don’t have one of your brothers. They don’t have Edward Prince of Wales, they don’t have Richard Duke of York, his brother and heir. If they had either one of them, they would have had him ready, standing by to take the throne as soon as the battle was won. If either one of your brothers was alive they would have had him, ready to claim the throne, as soon as I was dead. But they don’t! They don’t!

“It’s all been gossip, and rumors, and false sightings and lying reports. They did all this for a bluff. They fooled me—I don’t mind telling you that they frightened me—but it was a May game, a nothing. They made rumors about a boy in Portugal, they whispered about a boy who got out of the Tower alive; but it was all nothing. I have had men hunting all over Christendom for a boy and now I see he is nothing more than a dream. I am content now, that it was all nothing.”

I register the color in his cheeks and the brightness of his eyes and realize that I am seeing my husband for the first time without his constant burden of fear. I smile at him; his relief is so powerful that I feel it myself. “We’re safe,” I say.

“We Tudors are safe at last,” he responds. He puts out his hand to me and I understand that he will stay in my bed tonight. I rise to my feet but I am not eager, I feel no desire. I am not unwilling, I am a faithful wife and my husband is safe home from a terrible battle, happier than I have ever seen him, and I cannot help but be glad that he is safe. I welcome him home, I even welcome him to my bed.

Gently, he unties the laces under my chin and takes off my nightcap. He turns me around and pulls my hair from the plait, unties the belt at my waist and the little ties at my shoulders, and drops my gown to the ground, so that I am naked before him, my hair tumbling down. He sighs and put his lips to my bare shoulder. “I shall crown you as Queen of England,” he says simply, and takes me into his arms.

We go on a progress to celebrate the king’s great victory. My Lady the King’s Mother rides a great warhorse, as if she were caparisoned for battle. I ride the horse that Richard gave me; I feel as if he and I have been through many journeys together, and always riding away from Richard, and never with him as he promised. Henry rides often at my side. I know that he wants to demonstrate to the people who come out to see us that he is married to the York princess, that he has unified the houses and defeated the rebels. But now there is more than this: I know that he likes to be with me. We even laugh together as we ride through the small villages of Lincolnshire and the people come tumbling out of their houses and run across their fields to see us go by.

“Smiling,” Henry says to me, beaming at half a dozen peasants whose opinions—surely—matter not at all, one way or the other.

“Waving,” I coach him, and take my hand from the reins and make a little gesture.

“How do you do it?” He stops his rictus grin at the crowd and turns to me. “That little wave, you look as if it’s easy. You don’t look practiced at all.”

I think for a moment. “My father used to say that you must remember they have turned out to see you, they want to feel that you are their friend. You are among friends and loyal supporters. A smile or a wave is a greeting to people who have only come to admire you. You might not know them—but they think they know you. They deserve to be greeted as friends.”

“But did he never think that they would turn out just as eagerly to greet his enemy? Did he not think that these are false smiles and hollow cheers?”

I consider this for a moment, and then I giggle. “To tell you the truth, I think it never occurred to him at all,” I say. “He was terribly vain, you know. He always thought that everybody adored him. And mostly, they did. He rode around thinking everyone loved him. He claimed the throne on his merits as a true heir. He always thought he was the finest man in England, he never doubted it.”

He shakes his head, and forgets to wave to someone who calls, À Tudor! It is only one voice, no one else takes up the call, and the cry just sounds wrong, strangely unconvincing. “He can’t have been told more often than I that he was born to be king,” he says. “Nobody in the world could be more sure than my mother that her son should be king.”

“He was fighting from boyhood,” I say. “At the age that you were in hiding, he was recruiting men and demanding their allegiance. It was very different for him. He was claiming the throne and drawing on the will of the people. He was the claimant: not his mother. Three suns appeared in the sky over his army. He was certain that he was chosen by God to be king. He was visible, he showed himself, at the same age, you were in hiding. He was fighting, you were running away.”

He nods. I think, but I don’t say, and he was blessed with bravery, he had a great natural courage and you are naturally fearful. And he had a wife that adored him, who married him for irresistible love, and her family embraced him, and his cause was their cause, and all of us—his daughters, his sons, his brothers-in-law, his sisters-in-law—we were all utterly loyal to him. He was at the center of a loving family and every one of them would have laid down their life for him. But you only have your mother and your uncle Jasper, and they are both cold of heart.

Someone ahead of us shouts “Hurrah!” and the yeomen of the guard raise their pikes and shout “Hurrah!” in full-throated reply, and I think that my father would never have created yeomen of the guard to lead the cheers for he always believed that everyone loved him, and he never had need of guarding.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUGUST 1487

We go back to London to prepare for my coronation. Henry makes a royal entry into the city, and attends a service of thanksgiving for his victory in St. Paul’s. He rewards the faithful, even those who had little choice but to be faithful since they were locked up in the Tower, releasing Thomas Howard the Earl of Surrey and my half brother Thomas Grey from their imprisonment.

Archbishop John Morton is made Lord Chancellor, which only makes me and others wonder what assistance a Father of the Church could provide for a king that should lead to so great a reward.

“Spying,” Thomas Grey tells me. “Morton and My Lady the King’s Mother together run the greatest spy network that the world has ever seen, and not a man moves in and out of England but their son and protégé know of it.”

My half brother is seated with me in my presence chamber, and the music for dancing covers our words as my ladies practice new steps in one corner of the room and we talk in another. I hold up my sewing to cover my face so that no one can see my lips. I am so pleased to see him after so long that I cannot keep myself from beaming.

“Have you seen our Lady Mother?” I ask.

He nods.

“Is she well? Does she know I am to be crowned?”

“She’s well, quite happy at the abbey. She sent you her love and best wishes for your coronation.”

“I can’t get him to release her to court,” I admit. “But he knows he can’t hold her there forever. He has no cause.”

“Yes but he does have cause,” my half brother says with a wry smile. “He knows that she sent money to Francis Lovell and John de la Pole. He knows that she has united all of the Yorkists who plot against him. Under Henry’s nose, under your nose, she was running a spy network of her own, from Scotland to Flanders. He knows that she has been linking all of them, in turn, to Duchess Margaret in Flanders. But what drives him quite mad is that he can’t say that out loud. He can’t accuse her, because to do so would be to admit that there was a plot against him, inspired by our mother, funded by your aunt, and assisted by your grandmother, Duchess Cecily. He can’t admit to England that the surviving House of York is completely united against him. By exposing the conspiracy, he shows the threat they are. It looks far too much like a conspiracy of women in favor of a child of their household. It is overwhelming evidence for the one thing that Henry wants to deny.”

“What is that?” I ask.

Thomas leans his chin on his hand so his fingers cover his mouth. No one can read his lips as he whispers, “It looks as though those women are working together for a York prince.”

“But Henry says that since no York prince came to England, ready for the victory, he cannot exist.”

“Such a boy would be a precious boy,” Thomas objects. “You wouldn’t bring him to England until the victory was won and the coast secure.”

“A precious boy?” I echo. “You mean a pretend prince, a false token. A counterfeit.”

He smiles at me. Thomas has been under arrest in one place or another for two long years: in France since before the battle of Bosworth, and more recently in the Tower of London. He’s not going to say anything that will put him back behind bars again.

“A pretender. Of course, that is all that he could possibly be.”

Henry stays in London only long enough to assure everyone that his victory over the rebels was total, that he was never in any danger, and that the crowned king that they paraded in Dublin is now a frightened boy in prison; then he takes his most trusted lords and goes north again, to one great house after another where he holds inquiries and learns which lords failed to secure the roads, who whispered to someone else that there was no need to support the king, those who looked the other way while the rebel army stormed by, and those who saddled up, sharpened their swords, and treasonously went out to join them. Relentlessly, dealing in details and whispers, gatepost gossip and alehouse insults, Henry tracks down every single man whose loyalty wavered when the cry went up for York. He is determined that those men who joined the rebels should be punished, some put to death as traitors but most fined to the point of ruin, and the profit paid to the royal treasury. He ventures as far north as Newcastle, deep into the York heartlands, and sends ambassadors to the court of James III of Scotland with proposals for a peace treaty and for marriages to make the treaties hold firm. Then he turns and rides home to London, a conquering hero, leaving the North reeling with death and debt.

He summons the boy Lambert Simnel to his presence chamber and commands the attendance of his whole court: My Lady the King’s Mother, an eager spectator of her son’s doings; myself with my ladies headed by my two sisters, my cousin Maggie at my side; my aunt Katherine, smilingly accompanying her victorious husband, Jasper Tudor; all the faithful lords and those who have managed to pass as faithful. The double doors slam open, and the yeomen guard ground their pikes with a bang and shout the name, “John Lambert Simnel!” and everyone turns to see a skinny boy, frozen in the doorway until someone pushes him inwards and he takes a few steps into the room and then sinks on his knees to the king.

My first thought is that he does indeed look very like my brother looked, when I last saw him. This is a blond, pretty boy of about ten years old, and when my mother and I smuggled my brother out of sanctuary that dark evening, he was as bright and as slender as this. Now, if he is alive somewhere, he would be about fourteen, he would be growing into a young man. This child could never have passed for him.

“Does he remind you of anybody?” The king takes my hand and leads me from my chair beside his to walk down the long room to where the boy is kneeling, his head bowed, the nape of his neck exposed, as if he expects to be beheaded here and now. Everyone is silent. There are about a hundred people in the privy chamber and everyone turns to look at the boy as Henry approaches him, and the child droops lower and his ears burn.

“Anyone think he looks familiar?” Henry’s hard gaze rakes my family, my sisters with their heads down as if they are guilty, my cousin Maggie with her eyes on the little boy who looks so like her brother, my half brother Thomas who is gazing around indifferently, determined that no one shall see him flinch.

“No,” I say shortly. He is slight like my brother Richard and has cropped blond hair like his. I can’t see his face but I caught a glimpse of hazel eyes like my brother’s, and at the back of his head there are a few childish curls on the nape of the neck, just like Richard’s. When he used to sit at my mother’s feet, she would twist his curls around her fingers as if they were bright golden rings, and she would read to him until he was sleepy and ready for bed. The sight of the little boy, on his knees, makes me think once more of my brother Richard, and of the page that we sent into the Tower to take his place, of my missing brother Prince Edward, and of my cousin Edward of Warwick—Maggie’s brother—in the Tower alone. It is as if there is a succession of boys, York boys, all bright, all charming, all filled with promise; but nobody can be sure where they are tonight, or even if they are alive or dead, or if they are unreal, flights of fancy and pretenders like this one.

“Does he not remind you of your cousin Edward of Warwick?” Henry asks me, speaking clearly so that the whole court can hear.

“No, not at all.”

“Would you ever have mistaken him for your dead brother Richard?”

“No.”

He turns from me, now that this masque has been played out and everyone can say that the boy knelt before us and I looked at him and denied him. “So anyone who thought that he was a son of York was either deceived or a deceiver,” Henry rules. “Either a fool or a liar.”

He waits for everyone to understand that John de la Pole, Francis Lovell, and my own mother were fools and liars, and then he goes on: “So, boy, you are not who you said you were. My wife, a princess of York, does not recognize you. She would say if you were her kinsman as you claim. But she says you are not. So who are you?”

For a moment I think the child is so afraid that he has lost the power of speech. But then, keeping his head down and his eyes on the ground, he whispers: “John Lambert Simnel, if it please Your Grace. Sorry,” he adds awkwardly.

“John Lambert Simnel.” Henry rolls the name around his tongue like a bullying schoolmaster. “John. Lambert. Simnel. And how ever have you got from your nursery, John, to here? For it has been a long journey for you, and a costly and time-consuming trouble for me.”

“I know, Sire. I’m very sorry, Sire,” the child says.

Someone smiles in sympathy at the little treble voice, and then catches Henry’s furious look and glances away. I see Maggie’s face is white and strained and Anne is shaking and slips her hand into Cecily’s arm.

“Did you take the crown on your head though you knew you had no right to it?”

“Yes, Sire.”

“You took it under a false name. It was put on your head but you knew your lowborn head did not deserve it.”

“Yes, Sire.”

“The boy whose name you took, Edward of Warwick, is loyal to me, recognizing me as his king. As does everyone in England.”

The child has lost his voice; only I am close enough to hear a little sob.

“What d’you say?” Henry shouts at him.

“Yes, Sire,” the child quavers.

“So it meant nothing. You are not a crowned king?”

Obviously, the child is not a crowned king. He is a lost little boy in a dangerous world. I nip my lower lip to stop myself from crying. I step forwards and I gently put my hand in Henry’s arm. But nothing will restrain him.

“You took the holy oil on your breast but you are not a king, nor did you have any right to the oil, the sacred oil.”

“Sorry,” comes a little gulp from the child.

“And then you marched into my country, at the head of an army of paid men and wicked rebels, and were completely, utterly defeated by the power of my army and the will of God!”

At the mention of God, My Lady the King’s Mother steps forwards a little, as if she too wants to scold the child. But he stays kneeling, his head sinks lower, he almost has his forehead on the rushes on the floor. He has nothing to say to either power or God.

“What shall I do with you?” Henry asks rhetorically. At the startled look on the faces of the court, I realize that they have suddenly understood, like me, that this is a hanging matter. It is a matter for hanging, drawing, and quartering. If Henry hands this child over to the judge, then he will be hanged by his neck until he is faint with pain, then the executioner will cut him down, slide a knife from his little genitals to his breastbone, pull out his heart, his lungs, and his belly, set light to them before his goggling eyes, and then cut off his legs and his arms, one by one.

I press Henry’s arm. “Please,” I whisper. “Mercy.”

I meet Maggie’s aghast gaze and see that she too has realized that Henry may take this tableau through to a deathly conclusion. Unless we play another scene altogether. Maggie knows that I can perform one great piece of theater and that I may have to do this. As the wife of the king, I can kneel to him publicly and ask for clemency for a criminal. Maggie will come forwards and take off my hood, and my hair will tumble down around my shoulders, and then she will kneel, all my ladies will kneel behind me.

We in the House of York have never done such a thing, as my father liked to deal out punishment or mercy on his own account, having no time for the theater of cruelty. We in the House of York never had to intercede for a little boy against a vindictive king. They did it in the House of Lancaster: Margaret of Anjou on her knees for misled commoners before her sainted husband. It is a royal tradition, it is a recognized ceremony. I may have to do it to save this little boy from unbearable pain. “Henry,” I whisper. “Do you want me to kneel for him?”

He shakes his head. And at once, I am so afraid that he does not want me to intercede for mercy because he is determined to order the child to be executed. I grip his hand again. “Henry!”

The boy looks up. He has bright hazel eyes just like my little brother. “Will you forgive me, Sire?” he asks. “Out of your mercy? Because I’m only ten years old? And I know that I shouldn’t have done it?”

There is a terrible silence. Henry turns from the boy and conducts me back to the dais. He takes his seat and I sit beside him. I am conscious of a sudden deep throbbing in my temples as I rack my brains as to what I can do to save this child.

Henry points at him. “You can work in the kitchens,” he says. “Spit lad. You look like you could be lively in my kitchens. Will you do it?”

The boy flushes with relief and the tears fill his eyes and spill down his rosy cheeks. “Oh, yes, Sire!” he says. “You are very good. Very merciful!”

“Do as you are bid and perhaps you will work your way up to be a cook,” Henry commends him. “Now go to work.” He snaps his fingers to a waiting servant. “Take Master Simnel to the kitchen with my compliments and tell them to set him to work.”

There is a rustle of applause and then suddenly a gale of laughter sweeps the court. I take Henry’s hand, and I am laughing too, the relief at his decision is so great. He is smiling, he is smiling at me. “You never thought that I would make war on such a child?”

I shake my head, and there are tears in my own eyes from laughter and relief. “I was so afraid for him.”

“He did nothing, he was their little standard. It is the ones behind him that I must punish. It is the ones who set him up that deserve the scaffold.” His eyes rove down the court as they talk among themselves and share their relief. He looks at my aunt, Elizabeth de la Pole, who has lost her son, who has tight hold of Maggie’s hands and they are both crying. “The real traitors will not get off so lightly,” he says ominously. “Whoever they are.”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1487

I dress for my coronation and reflect that it is a different task preparing to be queen than it was preparing to be a bride. This time, laced into a gown of white and gold, with lacings of gold trimmed with royal ermine, I am not shivering with unhappiness. I know what to expect from my husband and we have found a way to be together which skirts the secrets of the past and shields our gaze from the uncertainty in our future. I have given him a son for us to love, he is giving me a crown. His mother’s preference for him above all other and her fierce enmity to my family is a feature of my life that I have come to accept. The mystery of my absent brother and Henry’s fear of my family is something that we live with daily.

I have learned to recognize his temper, his sudden rush into rage; I have learned that it is always caused by his fear that despite the victory, despite the support of his mother, despite her declaration that God Himself is on the side of the Tudors, he will fail her and God and be cut from the throne as cruelly and as unjustly as the king he saw killed at his feet.

But I have also learned his tenderness, his love of his son, his dutiful powerful obedient submission to his mother, and—growing every day—his warmth towards me. When I disappoint him, when he suspects me, it is as if his whole world is uncertain once again. More and more he wants to love and trust me; and more and more I find that I want him to.

There is much to give me joy today. I have a son in the nursery and a husband who is secure on his throne. My sisters are safe and I am no longer haunted by dreams or ill with grief. But still, I have much to regret. Although it is my coronation day, my family are defeated. My mother is missing, enclosed in Bermondsey Abbey, my cousin John de la Pole is dead. My uncle Edward is high in the king’s trust, but is far away in Granada on crusade against the Moors, and my half brother Thomas is so careful around the king that every day he performs a sort of relentless dance on tiptoe to ensure that he doesn’t alert Henry’s suspicions. Cecily is a girl of York no longer, married to a Tudor supporter, never speaking a word without her husband’s sanction, and all my other sisters will be earmarked by My Lady the King’s Mother for Tudor loyalists; she won’t risk any one of them being made a focus for rebellion. Worst of all, worse than everything, is that Teddy is still held in the Tower and the surge of confidence that Henry felt after the battle of East Stoke has not led him to release the boy, though I have asked for it, even asked for Teddy’s freedom as a coronation day gift. His sister Maggie’s white face among my ladies is a constant reproach to me. I said that she and Teddy could come to London and that they would be safe. I said that my mother could keep them safe. I said that I would be Teddy’s guardian but I was powerless, my mother herself is enclosed, My Lady the King’s Mother has Teddy as her ward and has taken his fortune into her keeping. I did not allow for Henry’s secret terror. I did not think that a king would persecute a boy.

There have been triumphs for the House of York. Henry may have won at the battle of East Stoke but it was not a heroic campaign; and though most of his lords brought their men, very few of them actually joined the battle. A troubling number of them did not even attend. Henry has the crown on his head and an heir in his nursery but one of his kingdoms offered their crown to someone else—an unknown boy—in preference to him; and there is a constant continuing whisper about another heir, another heir somewhere in hiding, waiting his turn.

It is not my mother but Maggie who brushes out my hair and straightens it over my shoulders where it falls down my back, almost to my waist. Cecily puts the gold net over my head, and on top of that I will wear a gold circlet with diamonds and rubies. There are a lot of rubies, they signify a virtuous woman, and this will be my principal role for the rest of my life—a virtuous woman and a Tudor queen whose motto is “humble and penitent.” It does not matter that in my heart I am passionate and independent. My true self will be hidden and history will never speak of me except as the daughter of one king, the wife of another, and the mother of a third.

The royal barge is to take me upriver to Westminster and the Mayor of London and all the guilds will come in their liveried ships with music and singing to escort me. Yet again my mother will look from her window and see a royal procession going along the river to a coronation; but this time it will be her daughter in the barge that rows past her prison. I know that she will look out of the abbey windows to see me go by, and I hope she will take a pleasure in knowing that this plan of hers, at least, has come to fruition. She has put me on the throne of England and though the gilded barge is being rowed upstream past her without acknowledgment—and it is the fourth coronation procession without her on board—this time at least she has put her daughter on the golden throne and the people lining the riverbank will call À York.

I walk down to the pier with my ladies holding my train high to stop it sweeping on the damp carpet, and they help me on board the ship. It is magnificent, decked out for the day with flags and flowers, escorted by decorated barges and vessels of all sorts. They play music as I come on board, and a choir sings an anthem to my virtues. I take my place in the stern, a cloth of gold over my head, the gold throne cushioned with velvet. My ladies gather around me. We are a famously beautiful court and today every woman is dressed in her very best. The rowers take the beat from the drum, the other barges assemble before and behind us. I pin a smile on my face as the oars dig deep in the water and we set off.

One of the accompanying barges has a figurehead in the shape of a dragon’s head, and a coiled tail fixed on the stern. It is a Tudor dragon and every so often they light a flame in its mouth and it breathes fire over the water, so that the people on the riverbank scream and cheer. They call À York to me, in defiance of all the evidence that this is a Tudor celebration. I cannot help but smile at the faithful love that people have for my house, even as the pennants flutter white and green and the Tudor dragon gives his little sputtering roar.

The royal barge is mid-river, moving easily on the inward tide, but as we get to Bermondsey and I see the brick and flint gatehouse of the abbey, the steersman sets a course for the opposite bank so that we are as far away as possible from my mother’s prison. I can see the people waiting by the sheltering perimeter walls of the abbey, but I cannot make out the figures. I raise my hand to shield my eyes and the gold crown scratches my fingers. I cannot see my mother among the crowd, we are too far out on the river and there are too many people for me to spot her. I want to see her, I so want to see her. I want her to know that I am looking for her. For a moment I wonder if she has been ordered to stay in her cell as the barge goes by. I wonder if she will be seated in her chair, in the cool whitewashed cell, listening to the music bawled across the water, smiling at the noisy roar of the dragon vomiting fire, but not knowing that I am looking for her.

And then, suddenly, as if by magic, I see her. There is a standard, uncurling and flapping in the breeze from the river. It is Tudor green, the new color of loyalty, Tudor green background embroidered with the Tudor rose of white and red, as every sensible person would show today. But this flag is different: it’s a white rose on the Tudor green and if there is a red center to the rose, it is stitched so small that it cannot be seen. At first glance, at closer glance, this is the white rose of York. And there, of course, is my mother standing under the standard of the husband she adored, and as I look towards her and raise my hand, she gives a girlish jump of joy that I have seen her and she waves both her hands above her head, shouting my name, exuberant, laughing, rebellious as ever. She starts to run along the riverbank, keeping pace with my distant barge, shouting, “Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Hurrah!” so clearly that I can hear her over the noise across the water. I rise up from my solemn throne, rush to the side of the boat, and lean out to wave back at her, quite without any dignity, and shout, “Lady Mother! Here I am!” and laugh aloud in delight that I have seen her, and that she has seen me, and that I am going to my coronation with her laughing, easy blessing.

My coronation is the signal for a rash of betrothals, as Henry, in his methodical way, exploits my sisters one by one as players for the House of Tudor, and makes political matches to his own advantage. Even my mother is brought into play again. He allows me to visit her at Bermondsey with my sisters, and take her the news that she is so far forgiven by the Tudors that they have revived the idea of her marriage, and she is to go to James III of Scotland.

I am afraid that the abbey will be cold and unwelcoming but I find my mother before a roaring fire of applewood, which gives a smoky scent to her presence chamber, my half sister, Grace, seated beside her, and two ladies-in-waiting working on their sewing.

My mother rises up as I come in with my sisters and kisses us all. “How lovely to see you.” She curtseys to me. “I should have said “Your Grace.’ ” She steps back to see me. “You look very well.”

She holds open her arms for Bridget and Catherine, who rush to hug her, and she smiles at Anne over their bobbing heads. “And you, Cecily, what a pretty gown, and what a fine brooch in your bonnet. Your husband is kind to you?”

“He is,” Cecily says stiffly, well aware of the suspicions against my mother. “And he is very highly regarded by His Grace the King and My Lady the King’s Mother. He is famous for his loyalty, and so am I.”

My mother smiles as if it does not matter much to her either way, and sits back down again, drawing my little sisters, seven-year-old Bridget and eight-year-old Catherine, onto her knee. Anne takes a footstool beside them and my mother rests her hand on her shoulder and looks expectantly at me.

“We’re to be married!” Catherine bursts out, unable to wait any longer. “All of us but Bridget.”

“Because I am a bride of Christ,” Bridget says, solemn as a moppet can be.

“Of course you are.” My mother gives her a hug. “And who are the lucky men to be? Staunch Tudors, I expect?”

Cecily bristles at the reference to her husband. “You’re betrothed as well,” she says spitefully.

My mother is completely unmoved. “James of Scotland again?” she asks me, smiling.

I realize that she knows of this already. Her spy network must still be in place and serving her as well here, where she is supposed to be isolated and secluded, as it did in the royal court where she was supposed to be surrounded by loyalists.

“You knew?”

“I knew the king had sent ambassadors to Scotland and was forging a peace with them,” she says smoothly. “Of course he would make it binding with a wedding. And since he had thought of me earlier, I imagined he would return to the plan.”

“Do you mind?” I ask urgently. “Because if you want to refuse, I could perhaps . . .”

Gently she reaches forwards and takes my hand. “I don’t think you could,” she says. “If you can’t prevent him from keeping your cousin Edward in the Tower, nor persuade him that I need not be behind these walls, then I doubt you can influence his policy with Scotland. He has made you queen, but though you carry the scepter, you have no power.”

“That’s what I always say,” Cecily adds. “She can’t do anything.”

“Then I am sure you are right.” My mother smiles at her. To me she says quietly: “And you should not reproach yourself. I know you do the best that you can. A woman always has only as much power as she can win, and you are not married into a family which trusts you with authority.”

“But I am to be married to a Scottish prince!” Catherine squeaks, unable to hold back the news any longer. “The younger one. So I shall go to Scotland with you, Lady Mother, and I can be in your rooms, I can be your lady-in-waiting.”

“Ah, how glad I shall be to have you with me.” My mother leans forward and drops a kiss on Catherine’s white-lace-capped head. “It will be so much easier if we are together. And we can make great state visits to your sister. We can ride to London in a procession and she can put on a banquet for us royal ladies of Scotland.”

“And I am to marry the heir, the next King of Scotland,” Anne says quietly. She is less exuberant than Catherine. At twelve she knows well enough that to marry your country’s enemy in an attempt to hold him to an alliance is no great treat.

My mother looks at her with silent compassion. “Well, we will all be together, that’s one good thing,” she says. “And I can advise you, and help you. And to be a queen of Scotland is no small part to play, Anne.”

“What about me?” Bridget asks.

My mother’s gaze flicks to my face. “Perhaps you will be allowed to come with me to Scotland,” she says. “I would think the king would grant that.”

“And if not, I’ll come here,” Bridget says with satisfaction, looking round at my mother’s beautiful rooms.

“I thought you wanted to be a nun,” Cecily says crushingly. “Not live like a pope.”

My mother giggles. “Oh Cecily, d’you really think I live like a pope? How quite wonderful. Do you think I have rooms full of hidden cardinals who serve me? And eat off gold plates?”

She gets to her feet and puts out her hands to the two little ones. “Come, Cecily reminds me that we must go and dine. You can say grace for the Sisters, Bridget.”

As we go out she draws me close to her. “Don’t fret,” she says quietly. “There are many slips between a betrothal and a wedding, and holding the Scots to a peace treaty is a miracle that I have yet to witness. Nobody is riding up the Great North Road just yet.”

PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, SPRING 1488

My uncle Edward comes home from the crusades as brown as a Moor himself, but missing all his front teeth. He’s cheerful about this and says that God can now see more clearly into his heart, but it gives him a lisp that I cannot help but find comical. I am so pleased to see him that I fall into his arms and hear him sweetly lisp over my head, “Bleth you, bleth you!” and this makes me laugh and cry at once.

I expect him to be appalled at the news that his sister is enclosed at Bermondsey, but his shrug and smile tell me that he sees this as a temporary setback in a life which has been filled with defeats and victories. “Is she comfortable?” he asks, as if it is the only question.

“Yes, she has lovely rooms and she’s well served. Clearly, they all adore her,” I reply. “Grace is with her, and the porteress calls her ‘the queen’ as if nothing had changed.”

“Then she will no doubt organize her life just as she wants,” he says. “She usually does.”

He is full of news of the crusade in Granada, of the beauty and elegance of the Moorish empire, of the determination of the Christian kings to drive the Moors completely from Spain. And he tells me stories about the Portuguese court, and their adventures. They are exploring far south down the coast of Afric, and he says there are mines of gold there, and markets full of spices, and a treasure house of ivory to be picked up by anyone who dares to go far enough as the sky gets hotter and the seas more stormy. There is a kingdom where the fields are made of gold and any man can have a fortune if he picks up the pebbles. There are strange animals and rare beasts—he has seen the hides, spotted and striped and gold as a noble—and perhaps there is a place ruled by a white Christian in the very heart of the great land, perhaps there is a kingdom of black men, devoted to a white Christian hero called Prester John.

Henry has no interest in news of magical kingdoms, but he takes Uncle Edward into his privy chamber the minute he arrives and they are locked together for half a day before Edward comes out with his toothless grin and Henry’s arm around his shoulders and I know that whatever he has reported, it has set Henry’s anxious mind at rest.

Henry trusts him so much that he is to lead a defense of Brittany. “When will you go?” I ask him.

“Almost at once,” he says. “There’s no time to lose and—” he grins his toothless smile “—I like to be busy.”

I take him immediately to the nursery at Eltham Palace to show him how much Arthur has grown. He can stand up now and walk alongside a chair or a stool. His greatest pleasure is to hold my fingers and take wavering steps across the room, turn around with his little feet pigeon-toed, and forge back again. He beams when he sees me and reaches out for me. He is starting to speak, singing like a little bird, though he has no words yet, but he says “Ma,” which I take to mean me, and “Boh,” which means anything that pleases him. But he giggles when I tickle him and drops anything that he is given in the hope that someone will pick it up and return it to him, so that he can drop it again. His greatest joy is when Bridget gives him a ball to drop, and flies after it as if they were playing tennis and she has to recover it before it bounces too often; it makes him gurgle and crow to see her run. “Is he not the most beautiful boy you have ever seen?” I ask Uncle Edward, and am rewarded by his toothless beam.

“And the boy you went to see?” I ask quietly, taking Arthur against my shoulder and gently patting his back. He is heavy on my shoulder and warm against my cheek. I have a sudden fierce desire that nothing shall ever threaten his peace or his safety. “Henry told me that he sent you to look at a boy in Portugal? I have heard nothing of him since you left.”

“Then the king will tell you that I saw a page boy in the service of Sir Edward Brampton,” my uncle says, his lisp endearing. “Some mischief-maker thought that he looked like my poor lost nephew Richard. People will make trouble over nothing. Alas, that they have nothing better to do.”

“And does he look like him?” I press.

Edward shakes his head. “No, not particularly.”

I glance around. There is no one near but the baby’s wet nurse and she has no interest in anything but eating enormous meals and drinking ale. “My lord uncle, are you sure? Can you speak to my Lady Mother about him?”

“I won’t speak to her of this lad because it would distress her,” he says firmly. “It was a boy who looked nothing like your brother, her son. I am sure of it.”

“And Edward Brampton?” I persist.

“Sir Edward is to come on a visit to England as soon as he can leave his business in Portugal,” he says. “He is letting his handsome page go out of his service. He does not want to cause any embarrassment to us or to the king with such a forward boy.”

There is more here than I can understand. “If the boy is nothing, a braggart, then how could such a nothing make such a loud noise in Lisbon that we can hear him in London? If he is a nothing, why did you go all the way to Portugal to see him? It’s nowhere near Granada. And why is Sir Edward coming to England? To meet with the king? Why would he be so honored, when he was known to be loyal to York and he loved my father? And why is he dismissing his page if the boy is a nobody?”

“I think the king would prefer it,” Edward says lightly.

I look at him for a moment. “There is something here that I don’t understand,” I say. “There is a secret here.”

My uncle pats my hand as I hold the baby’s warm body to my heart. “You know, there are always secrets everywhere; but it is better sometimes that you don’t know what they are. Don’t trouble yourself, Your Grace,” he says. “This new world is filled with mysteries. The things they told me in Portugal!”

“Did they speak of a boy returned from the dead?” I challenge him. “Did they speak of a boy who was hidden from unknown killers, smuggled abroad, and waiting for his time?”

He does not flinch. “They did. But I reminded them that the King of England has no interest in miracles.”

There is a little silence. “At least the king trusts you,” I say as I hand Arthur back to his wet nurse and watch him settle on her broad lap. “At least he is sure of you. Perhaps you can speak to him of my Lady Mother and she can come back to court. If there is no boy, then he has nothing to fear.”

“He’s not naturally a very trusting man,” my uncle observes with a smile. “I was followed all the way to Lisbon and my hooded companion noted everyone that I met. Another man followed me home again too, to make sure that I did not call on your aunt in Flanders on my way.”

“Henry spied on you? His own messenger? His spy? He spied on his spy?”

He nods. “And there will be a woman in your household who tells him what you say in your most private moments. Your own private confessor is bound to report to his Father in God, the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Morton. John Morton is the greatest friend of My Lady the King’s Mother. They plotted together against King Richard, together they destroyed the Duke of Buckingham. They meet every day and he tells her everything. Don’t ever dream that the king trusts any of us. Don’t ever think that you’re not watched. You are watched all the time. We all are.”

“But we’re doing nothing!” I exclaim. I lower my voice. “Aren’t we, Uncle? We are doing nothing?”

He pats my hand. “We’re doing nothing,” he assures me.

WINDSOR CASTLE, SUMMER 1488

But my aunt Margaret is not doing nothing. Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Flanders, sister to my father, is certainly not idle. Constantly, she writes to James III of Scotland, even sending him an envoy of York loyalists. “She is trying to persuade him to make war on us,” Henry says wearily. I have stepped into his privy chamber in the great castle, and found him with two clerks at either end of a great table and a salt-stained paper before him. I recognize my aunt’s great red wax seals and the trailing ribbons; she uses the sun in splendor, the great York crest created by my father. “But she won’t succeed. We have an alliance, we will have betrothals. James is sworn to be loyal to me. He’ll hold fast for Tudor England. He won’t turn backwards to York.”

But though Henry may be right and James is loyal in his heart, he can’t persuade his countrymen to support England. His country, his lords, even his heir are all against Tudor England, whatever the opinions of the king, and it is the country that wins. They turn against him rather than stomach an alliance with the Tudor arriviste, and James has to defend his friendship with England and even his throne. I receive a hastily scribbled note from my mother, but I don’t understand what she means:

So you see, I am not riding up the Great North Road.

I know that Henry will have seen this, almost as soon as it was written, so I take it at once to him to demonstrate my loyalty; but as I enter the royal privy chamber I stop, for there is a man with him that I think I know, though I cannot put a name to his darkly tanned face. Then as he turns towards me I think I had better forget everything I have ever known about him. This is Sir Edward Brampton, my father’s godson, the man that my uncle saw at the court in Portugal with the forward page boy. He turns and bows low to me, his smile quietly confident.

“You know each other?” my husband says flatly, watching my face.

I shake my head. “I am so sorry . . . you are?”

“I am Sir Edward Brampton,” he says pleasantly. “And I saw you once when you were a little princess, too young to remember an unimportant old courtier like me.”

I nod and turn my entire attention to Henry, as if I have no interest in Sir Edward at all. “I wanted to tell you that I have a note from Bermondsey Abbey.”

He takes it from my hand and reads it in silence. “Ah. She must know that James is dead.”

“Is that what she means? She writes only that she won’t be riding up the Great North Road. How did the king die? How could such a thing happen?”

“In battle,” Henry says shortly. “His country supported his son against him. It seems that some of us cannot even trust blood kin. You cannot be sure of your own heir, never mind another.”

Carefully I do not look towards Sir Edward. “I am sorry if this causes us trouble,” I say evenly.

Henry nods. “At any rate, we have a new friend in Sir Edward.”

I smile slightly, Sir Edward bows.

“Sir Edward is to come home to England next year,” Henry says. “He was a loyal servant of your father’s and now he is going to serve me.”

Sir Edward looks cheerful at this prospect and bows again.

“So when you reply to your mother, you can tell her that you have seen her old friend,” Henry suggests.

I nod and go towards the door. “And tell her that Sir Edward had a forward page boy, who made much of himself, but that he has now left his service and gone to work for a silk merchant. Nobody knows where he is now. He may have gone trading to Afric, perhaps to China, no one knows.”

“I’ll tell her that, if you wish,” I say.

“She’ll know who I mean,” Henry smiles. “Tell her that the page boy was an insolent little lad who liked to dress in borrowed silks but now he has a new master—a silk merchant as it happens, so he will be well suited in his work, and the boy has gone with him, and is quite disappeared.”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1488

The anxious Tudor scrutiny of the unreliable world around them ceases for the Christmas feast, as if it is finally possible that days can go by and small events happen, notes be written and received, without Henry having to see everything and know everything. With the disappearance of the invisible boy into the unknown it seems that there is nothing left to watch for, and the spies at the ports and the guardians on the roads can rest. Even My Lady the King’s Mother loses her frown and regards the arrival of the yule log, the jesters, the players, the mummers, and the choir with a small smile. Margaret is allowed to visit her brother in the Tower and comes back to Greenwich happier than she has been for some time.

“The king is allowing him a schoolmaster and some books,” she says. “And he has a lute. He’s playing music and composing songs, he sang one to me.”

Henry comes to my room every night after dinner and sits by the fire and talks about the day; sometimes he lies with me, sometimes he sleeps with me till morning. We are comfortable together, even affectionate. When the servants come and turn down the bed and take off my robe, he puts them to one side with his hand. “Leave us,” he says, and when they go out and close the door, he slips my robe from my shoulders himself. He puts a kiss on my naked shoulder and helps me into the high bed. Still dressed, he lies on the bed beside me and strokes my hair away from my face. “You’re very beautiful,” he says. “And this is our third Christmas together. I feel like a man well married, long married and to a beautiful wife.”

I lie still and let him pull the ribbon from the end of my plait and run his fingers through the sleek golden hanks of hair. “And you always smell so delicious,” he says quietly.

He gets up from the bed and unties the belt on his robe, takes it off, and lays it carefully on a chair. He is the sort of man who always keeps his things tidy. Then he lifts the bedding and slides in beside me. He is desirous and I am glad of it, for I want another child. Of course, we need another son to make the succession secure; but on my own account, I want that wonderful feeling of a baby in my belly and the sense of growing life within. So I smile at him and lift the hem of my robe and help him to move on me. I reach for him and feel the warm strength of his flesh. He is quick and gentle, shuddering with his own easy pleasure; but I feel nothing more than warmth and willingness. I don’t expect more, I am glad to at least feel willing, and grateful to him that he is gentle. He lies on me for a little while, his face buried in my hair, his lips at my neck, then he lifts himself away from me and says, surprisingly: “But it’s not like love, is it?”

“What?” I am shocked that he should say such a bald truth.

“It’s not like love,” he says. “There was a girl when I was a young man, in exile in Brittany, and she would creep out from her father’s house, risking everything to be with me. I’d be hiding in the barn, I used to burn up to see her. And when I touched her she would shiver, and when I kissed her she would melt, and once she held me and wrapped her arms and legs around me and cried out in her pleasure. She could not stop and I felt her sobs shake her whole body with joy.”

“Where is she now?” I ask. Despite my indifference to him I find I am curious about her, and irritated at the thought of her.

“Still there,” he says. “She had a child by me. Her family got her married off to a farmer. She’ll probably be a fat little farmer’s wife by now with three children.” He laughs. “One of them a redhead. What d’you think? Henri?”

“But no one calls you a whore,” I observe.

His head turns at that and he laughs out loud, as if I have said something extraordinary and funny. “Ah, dear heart, no. Nobody calls me a whore for I am King of England and a man. Whatever else you might like to change in the world, a York king on the throne, the battle reversed, Richard arising from the grave, you cannot hope to change the way that the world sees women. Any woman who feels desire and acts on it will always be called a whore. That will never change. Your reputation was ruined by your folly with Richard, for all that you thought it was love, your first love. You have only regained your reputation by a loveless marriage. You have gained a name but lost pleasure.”

At his casual naming of the man I love, I pull the covers up to my chin and gather my hair and plait it again. He does not stop me, but watches me in silence. Irritated, I realize that he is going to stay the night.

“Would you like your mother to come to court for Christmas?” he asks casually, turning to blow out the candle beside the bed. The room is lit only by the dying fire, his shoulder bronzed by the light of the embers. If we were lovers this would be my favorite time of the day.

“May I?” I almost stammer, I am so surprised.

“I don’t see why not,” he says casually. “If you would like her here.”

“I would like it above anything else,” I say. “I would like it very much. I would be so happy to have her with me again, and for Christmas, and my sisters, especially my little sisters . . . they’ll be so happy.” Impulsively I lean over and kiss his shoulder.

At once, he turns and catches my face and takes the kiss on his mouth. Gently, he kisses me again, and then again, and my distress at his mentioning Richard, and my jealousy of the girl he once loved, somehow prompt me to take his mouth against mine, and put my arms around his neck, then I feel his weight come on me and his body press against the length of me, as my lips open and I taste him and my eyes close as he holds me, and feel him gently, sweetly enter me again, and for the first time ever between the two of us, it does feel a little like love.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1489

It is a joyous Christmas with my mother at court, and then a long, cold winter in London. We command a special Mass to be sung for my uncle Edward, who died last year in his expedition against the French.

“He didn’t have to go,” I say, lighting a candle for him on the altar of the chapel.

My mother smiles, though I know that she misses him. “Oh, he did,” she says. “He was never a man who could stay quietly at home.”

“You will have to go quietly to your home,” I point out. “The feast of Christmas is over and Henry says you have to go back to the abbey.”

She turns towards the door and pulls the hood forwards over her silvery hair. “I don’t mind, as long as you and the girls are well, and I see that you are happy and at peace in yourself.”

I walk beside her and she takes my hand. “And you? Are you coming to love him, as I hoped you would do?” she says.

“It’s odd,” I confess. “I don’t find him heroic, I don’t think he is the most marvelous man in the world. I know he’s not very brave, he’s often bad-tempered. I don’t love him as I did Richard . . .”

“There are many sorts of love,” she counsels me. “And when you love a man who is less than you dreamed, you have to make allowances for the difference between a real man and a dream. Sometimes you have to forgive him. Perhaps you even have to forgive him often. But forgiveness often comes with love.”

In April, when the birds are singing in the fields south of the river, I tell Henry that I will not ride out hawking with him. He is mounting up in the stable yard and my horse, that has been kept inside for days, is curvetting and dancing on the spot, held tightly with his reins by a groom.

“He’s just fresh,” Henry says, looking from the eager gelding to me. “You can manage him, surely? It’s not like you to miss a day’s hawking. As soon as you’re on him he’ll be all right.”

I shake my head.

“Have another horse,” Henry suggests. I smile at his determination that I should ride with him. “Uncle Jasper will let you have his. He’s steady as a rock.”

“Not today,” I persist.

“Are you not well?” He throws his reins to his groom and jumps down to come to my side. “You look a little pale. Are you well, my love?”

At that endearment, I lean towards him and his arm comes around my waist. I turn my head so my lips are at his ear. “I have just been sick,” I whisper.

“But you’re not hot?” He flinches a little. The terror of the sweating sickness that came with his army is still a strong one. “Tell me you’re not hot!”

“It’s not the sweat,” I assure him. “And it’s not a fever. It’s not something I ate, nor unripe fruit.” I smile at him, but still he does not understand. “I was sick this morning, and yesterday morning, and I expect to be sick tomorrow too.”

He looks at me with dawning hope. “Elizabeth?”

I nod. “I’m with child.”

His arm tightens around my waist. “Oh, my darling. Oh, my sweetheart. Oh, this is the best news!”

In front of the whole court he kisses me warmly on the mouth and when he looks up, everyone must surely know what I have told him, for his face is radiant.

“The queen is not riding with us!” he shouts, as if it is the best news in the world.

I pinch his arm. “It’s too soon to tell anyone yet,” I caution him.

“Oh, of course, of course,” he says. He kisses my mouth and my hand. Everyone is looking with puzzled smiles at his joy. One or two nudge each other, guessing at once. “The queen is going to rest today!” he bellows. “There’s no need for concern. She is well. But she is going to rest. She is not going to ride. I don’t want her to ride. She is a little unwell.”

This confirms it; even the slowest young man whispers with his neighbor. Everyone guesses at once why Henry has me held tightly to his side and why he is beaming.

“You go and rest.” He turns to me, oblivious to the knowing smiles of his court. “I want you to make sure that you rest.”

“Yes,” I say, near to laughter myself. “I understand that. I think everyone understands that.”

He grins, sheepish as a shy boy. “I can’t hide how happy I am. Look, I’ll catch you the sweetest pheasant for your dinner.” He swings himself into the saddle. “The queen is unwell,” he tells the groom holding my mount. “You had better exercise her horse yourself. Today, and every day. I don’t know when she’ll be well enough to ride again.”

The groom bows to his knees. “I will, Your Grace,” he says. He turns to me: “I’ll keep him quiet for you so you can just walk out on him when you have a mind to it.”

“The queen is unwell,” Henry says to his companions, who are mounting up and beaming at him. “I shan’t say more.” He is grinning from ear to ear, like a boy. “I don’t say more. There’s no more to say.” He stands in his stirrups and raises his cap from his head and waves it in the air. “God save the queen!”

“God save the queen!” everyone shouts back at him and smiles at me, and I laugh up at Henry. “Very discreet,” I say to him. “Very courtly, very reticent, most discreet.”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1489

This time it is my decision when I go into confinement, and though My Lady the King’s Mother chooses the tapestries for my rooms and orders the day bed and the cradle, I have the room set out as I wish, and I tell her that I will go into confinement at the end of October.

“And I shall send for my mother to be with me,” I say.

At once her gaze sharpens. “Have you asked Henry?”

“Yes,” I lie to her face.

“And he has agreed?”

Clearly, she does not believe me for a moment.

“Yes,” I say. “Why would he not? My mother has chosen to live in retirement, a life of prayer and contemplation. She has always been a thoughtful and devout woman.” I look at the fixed expression on My Lady’s face—she has always prized herself as being formidably holy. “Everyone knows my mother has longed for the religious life,” I claim, feeling the lie grow more and more ambitious, and feeling myself tremble with the desire to giggle. “But I am sure she will consent to return to the world to stay with me when I am in confinement.”

Then, it is just a question of getting to Henry before his mother does so. I go to his rooms and though the door is shut to his presence chamber, I nod to the guard to let me in.

Henry is seated at a table in the center of the room with his most trusted advisors around him. He looks up as I come in and I see that he is scowling with worry.

“I’m sorry.” I hesitate in the doorway. “I didn’t realize . . .”

They all rise and bow and Henry comes quickly to my side and takes my hand. “It can wait,” he says. “Of course it can wait. Are you well? Nothing wrong?”

“Nothing wrong. I wanted to ask you a favor.”

“You know I can refuse you nothing,” he says. “What would you like? To bathe in pearls?”

“Just if my mother could be with me when I go into confinement.” As I say the words I see the shadow cross his face. “She was such a comfort to me last time, Henry, and she is so experienced, she has had so many children, and I need her.”

He hesitates. “She’s my mother,” I insist, my voice catching a little. “And it’s her grandchild.”

He thinks for a moment. “Do you have any idea what we are talking about here? Right now?”

I look past his shoulder at the grave-faced men, his uncle Jasper looking gloomily at a map. I shake my head.

“We keep getting reports from all over the country of little incidents of trouble. People planning to overthrow us, people plotting my death. In Northumberland a mob attacked the Earl of Northumberland, as he was collecting taxes for me. Not just a bit of rough play—d’you know, they pulled him off his horse and killed him?”

I gasp. “Henry Percy?”

He nods. “In Abingdon there’s a highly regarded abbot plotting against us.”

“Who?” I ask.

His face darkens. “It doesn’t matter who. In the northeast, Sir Robert Chamberlain and his sons were captured trying to set sail for your aunt in Flanders from the port of Hartlepool. Half a dozen little incidents, none of them connected, as far as we can see, but all of them signs.”

“Signs?”

“Of a discontented people.”

“Henry Percy?” I repeat. “How was his death a sign? I thought people were objecting to paying tax?”

The king’s face is grim. “The people of the North never forgave him for failing Richard at Bosworth,” he says, watching me. “So I daresay you too think it serves him right.”

I don’t reply to this, it is still too raw for me. Henry Percy told Richard that his troops were too tired to fight, having marched from the North—as if a commander brings troops to a battle who are too tired to fight! He put himself at the rear of Richard’s army and never moved forwards. When Richard charged off the hill to his death, Percy watched him go without stirring himself. I won’t grieve for him in his dirty little death. He’s no loss to me. “But none of this has anything to do with my mother,” I hazard.

Uncle Jasper gives me a long, cool look from his blue eyes as if he disagrees.

“Not directly,” Henry concedes. “She shot her last bolt with the kitchen boy’s rebellion. I’ve got nothing that identifies her with these scattered troubles.”

“So she could come into confinement with me.”

“Very well,” he decides. “She’s as safe inside with you as she is inside the abbey. And it shows that she is a member of our family, to anyone who still dreams that she represents York.”

“May I write to her today?”

He nods, takes my hand, and kisses it. “I can refuse you nothing,” he says. “Not when you are about to give me another son.”

“What if it’s a girl?” I ask, smiling at him. “Will you send me a bill for all these favors if I have a girl?”

He shakes his head. “It’s a boy. I am certain of it.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1489

My mother promises to come from Bermondsey but there is so much illness in London that she will not come into confinement with me straightaway but waits in her rooms for a few days to make sure that she is not carrying the pox, which comes with a painfully hot fever and terrible red spots all over the body.

“I wouldn’t bring it in on you,” she says when she finally comes in through the door, padded for silence, which opens so rarely on the outside world.

In a moment I am in her arms and she is hugging me and then stepping back to look at my face, and my big belly, and my swollen hands.

“You’ve taken all your rings off,” she remarks.

“They were too tight,” I say. “And my ankles are as fat as my calves.”

She laughs at that. “That will all be better when the baby comes,” she says, and presses me down to the day bed, sits at the end of it, takes my feet into her lap, and rubs them firmly with her strong hands. She strokes the soles, pulling gently at the toes until I almost purr with pleasure and she laughs at me again.

“You will be hoping for a boy,” she says.

“Not really.” I open my eyes and meet her gray gaze. “I am hoping that the baby is well and strong. And I would love a little girl. Of course we need a boy . . .”

“Perhaps a girl now, and a boy next,” she suggests. “King Henry is still kind to you? At Christmas he looked like a man in love.”

I nod. “He’s been most tender.”

“And My Lady?”

I make a face. “Most attentive.”

“Ah well, I’m here now,” my mother says, acknowledging that no one can outmatch My Lady the King’s Mother but herself. “Does she come in here for her meals?”

I shake my head. “She dines with her son. When I am in confinement she takes my place at the high table in the court.”

“Let her have her moment of glory,” my mother counsels. “And we’ll eat better in here without her. Who do you have as your ladies-in-waiting?”

“Cecily, Anne, and my cousin Margaret,” I say. “Though Cecily will do nothing for anyone as she is with child herself. And of course I have the king’s kinswomen, and those his mother insists that I keep about me.” I lower my voice. “I am sure that they report to her everything I do and say.”

“Bound to. And how is Maggie? And her poor little brother?”

“She’s allowed to visit him,” I say. “And she says that he is well enough. He has tutors now and a musician. But it’s no life for a boy.”

“Perhaps if Henry gets a second heir he’ll let poor Teddy out,” my mother says. “I pray for that poor boy, every night of his life.”

“Henry can’t let him out while he fears that the people might rise up for a duke of York,” I say. “And even now there are constant uprisings in the country.”

She does not ask me who is rising, or what they are saying. She does not ask me which counties. She goes to the window and draws back a corner of the thick tapestry and looks out as if she has no interest, and from this, I know that Henry is wrong and that my mother has not shot her last bolt of rebellion. On the contrary, she is in the thick of it again. She knows more than I do, she probably knows more than Henry does.

“What’s the point of it?” I ask impatiently. “What’s the point of going on and on causing trouble, while men risk their lives and have to run away to Flanders with a price on their heads? Families are ruined and mothers lose their sons just as you did, women like my aunt Elizabeth, bereft of her son John, her next boy under suspicion. What d’you hope to achieve?”

She turns and her expression is as tender and as steadfast as ever. “I?” she says with her limpid smile. “I achieve nothing. I am just an old grandmother living in Bermondsey Abbey, glad of a chance to visit my darling daughter. I think of nothing but my soul and my next dinner. Causing no trouble at all.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, 28 NOVEMBER 1489

The pains start in the early hours of the morning, waking me with a deep stir in my belly. My mother is with me the moment that I groan, and she holds my hands while the midwives mull some ale and set up the icon so that I can see it while I labor. It is my mother’s cool hand on my head when I am sweating and exhausted, and it is her gaze, locked on mine, quietly persuading me that there is no pain, that there is nothing but a divine cool floating on a constant river, that takes me through the long hours until I hear a cry and realize that it is over and that I have a baby and they put my little girl into my arms.

“My son commands that you honor me with naming Her Grace the Princess for me.” The sudden appearance of Lady Margaret jolts me back to the real world and behind her I see my mother folding linen and bowing her head and trying not to laugh.

“What?” I ask. I am still hazy with the birthing ale and with the magic that my mother manages to weave, so that pain recedes and the time passes.

“I shall be very glad to be her name-giver.” Lady Margaret pursues her own thought. “And it is so like my son to honor me. I only hope that your boy Arthur is as good and as loving a son to you, as mine is to me.”

My mother, who had two royal sons who adored her, turns away and puts the linen into a chest.

“Princess Margaret of the House of Tudor,” My Lady says, savoring the sound of her own name.

“Is it not vanity, to name a child after yourself?” my mother inquires, dulcet from the corner of the room.

“She is named for my saint,” Lady Margaret replies, not at all disconcerted. “It is not for my own glory. And besides, it is your own daughter who chooses the name. Is it not, Elizabeth?”

“Oh yes,” I say obediently, too tired to argue with her. “And the main thing is that she is well.”

“And beautiful,” my beautiful mother remarks.

Because so many have the pox in London, we don’t hold a big christening, and I am churched privately and return to my rooms and to the life of the court without a great feast. I know also that Henry is not going to waste money on celebrating the birth of a princess. He would have had a public holiday and wine flowing in the public fountains for another boy.

“I’m not disappointed in a girl,” he assures me as he meets me in the nursery and I find him with the precious baby in his arms. “We need another boy, of course, but she is the prettiest, daintiest little girl that was ever born.”

I stand at his shoulder and look into her face. She is like a little rosebud, like a petal, hands like little starfish and fingernails like the tiniest shells ever washed up by a tide.

“Margaret for my mother,” Henry says, kissing her white-capped little head.

My cousin Maggie steps forwards to take the baby from us. “Margaret for you,” I whisper to her.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1491

Two years pass before we conceive another child, and then at last it is the boy that my husband needed. He greets him with a sort of passion, as if this boy was a fortune. Henry is coming to have a reputation as a king who loves gold in his treasury; this boy is like a new-minted sovereign coin, another Tudor creation.

“We’ll call him Henry,” he declares, as the boy is put into his arms when he visits me, a week after the birth.

“Henry for you?” I ask him, smiling from the bed.

“Henry for the sainted king,” he says sternly, reminding me that just when I think we are most happy and most easy, Henry is still looking over his shoulder, justifying his crown. He looks from me to my cousin Margaret as if we were responsible for the old king’s imprisonment in the Tower and then his death. Margaret and I exchange one guilty look. It was probably our fathers working together with our uncle Richard who held a pillow over the poor innocent king’s sleeping face. At any rate, we are close enough to the murder to feel guilt when Henry calls the old king a saint and names his newborn son for him.

“As you wish,” I say lightly. “But he does look so like you. A copper-head, a proper Tudor.”

He laughs at that. “A redhead, like my uncle Jasper,” he says with pleasure. “Pray God gives him my uncle’s luck.”

He is smiling, but I can see the strain around his eyes, with the look I have come to dread, as if he is a man haunted. This is how he looks when he bursts out in sudden complaints. This is the look that I think he wore for all those years when he was in exile and he could trust no one and feared everybody, and every message that he had from home warned him of my father, and every messenger who brought it could be a murderer.

I nod to Maggie, who is as sensitive as I am to Henry’s uncertain temper, and she takes the baby and gives him to his wet nurse, and then sits beside the two of them, as if she would disappear behind the woman’s warm bulk.

“Is something the matter?” I ask quietly.

He glares at me for a moment, as if I have caused the problem, and then I see him soften, and shake his head. “Odd news,” he says. “Bad news.”

“From Flanders?” I ask quietly. It is always my aunt who causes this deep line between his brows. Year after year she goes on sending spies into England, money to rebels, speaks against Henry and our family, accuses me of disloyalty to our house.

“Not this time,” he says. “Perhaps something worse than the duchess . . . if you can imagine anything worse than her.”

I wait.

“Has your mother said anything to you?” he asks. “This is important, Elizabeth. You must tell me if she has said anything.”

“No, nothing,” I say. My conscience is clear. She did not come into confinement with me this time, she said she was unwell and feared bringing illness into the room with her. At the time I was disappointed, but now I have a clutch of apprehension that she stayed outside to weave treasonous plots. “I have not seen her. She has written nothing to me. She is ill.”

“She’s said nothing to your sisters?” he asks. He tips his head to where Maggie sits beside the wet nurse, petting my son’s little feet as he sleeps. “She’s said nothing? Your cousin of Warwick? Margaret? Nothing about her brother?”

“She asks me if he can be released,” I remark. “And I ask it of you, of course. He is doing nothing wrong—”

“He’s doing nothing wrong in the Tower because he is powerless to do anything as my prisoner,” Henry says abruptly. “If he were free, God knows where he would turn up. Ireland, I suppose.”

“Why Ireland?”

“Because Charles of France has put an invasion force into Ireland.” He speaks in a suppressed angry mutter. “Half a dozen ships, a couple of hundred men wearing the cross of St. George as if they were an English army. He has armed and fitted out an army marching under the flag of St. George! A French army in Ireland! Why d’you think he would do that?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I find I am whispering like him, as if we are conspirators, planning to overthrow a country, as if it is we who have no rights, who should not be here.

“D’you think he is expecting something?”

I shake my head. Truly, I am baffled. “Henry, really, I don’t know. What would the King of France be expecting to come out of Ireland?”

“A new ghost?”

I feel a shiver crawl slowly down my spine like a cold wind, though it is a summer day, and I gather my shawl around my shoulders. “What ghost?”

At that single potent word, I have lowered my voice like him, and the two of us sound as if we are calling up spirits as he leans towards me and says, “There’s a boy.”

“A boy?”

“Another boy. A boy who is trying to pass himself off as your dead brother.”

“Edward?”

“Richard.”

My old pain, at the name of the man I loved, given to the brother that I lost, taps on my heart like a familiar friend. I tighten my shawl again and find that I am hugging myself, as if for comfort.

“A boy pretending to be Richard? Who is he? Another false boy, another imposter?”

“I can’t trace this one,” Henry says, his eyes dark with fear. “I can’t find who’s backing him, I can’t discover where he comes from. They say he speaks several languages, carries himself like a prince. They say he is convincing—well, Simnel was a convincing child, that’s what they’re trained up to be.”

“They?”

“All these boys. All these ghosts.”

I am silent for a moment, thinking of my husband surrounded in his mind by many boys, nameless boys, ghost boys. I close my eyes.

“You’re tired, I shouldn’t have troubled you with this.”

“No. Not tired. Only weary at the thought of another pretender.”

“Yes,” he says, suddenly emphatic. “That’s what he is. You are right to name him so. Another pretender. Another liar, another false boy. I shall have to hunt him down, find out who he is and where he comes from, attack his story, split his lies like kindling, disgrace his sponsors, and ruin him and them together.”

I say the worst thing that I could say. “What d’you mean—that it is I who name him as a pretender? Who could he be if not a pretender?”

He stands at once and looks down on me, as if we were newly married and he still hated me. “Exactly. Who would he be if not a pretender? Sometimes, Elizabeth, you are so stupid that I find you quite brilliant.”

He walks out of the room, pale with resentment, and Maggie glances across at me and she looks afraid.

I come out of my confinement to dazzlingly hot summer weather and find the court anxious despite the birth of a second son. Every day brings a new message from Ireland, and the worst of it is that nobody dares to speak of it. Sweating horses stand in the stable yard, men caked in dust are taken straight in to see the king, his lords sit with him to hear their report, but nobody remarks upon it. It is as if we are at war but nobody will say anything; we are under siege in silence.

To me it is clear that the King of France is taking revenge on us for our long, loyal support of Brittany against him. My uncle died to keep Brittany independent from France; Henry never forgets that he found a safe exile in the little dukedom. He is honor-bound to support his former hosts. There is every reason for us to see France as our enemy. But for some reason, though the privy council is all but a council of war, nobody speaks openly against France. They say nothing, as if they are ashamed. France has put an army into our kingdom of Ireland and yet nobody rages against them. It is as if the lords feel that it is our fault, the failure of Henry to be a convincing king, that is the real problem, and that the French invasion is just another sign of this.

“The French don’t care about me,” Henry says to me tersely. “France is the enemy of the King of England, whoever he may be, whatever the color of his jacket. They want Brittany for themselves, and they want to cause trouble for England. The shame that they bring on me, of two rebellions in four years, means nothing to them. If the House of York were on the throne, then it would be you that they were conspiring against.”

We are standing in the stable yard, and around us is the usual buzz of conversation, the horses led out of their stalls by the grooms, the ladies lifted into the saddles, the gentlemen standing by their stirrups, passing up a glass of wine, holding a glove, talking, courting, enjoying the sunshine. We should be happy, with three children in the nursery and a loyal court around us.

“Of course, France is always our enemy,” I reply comfortingly. “As you say. And we have always resisted an invasion, and we have always won. Perhaps because you were in Brittany for all that long time, you learned to fear them overmuch? For look—you have your spies and your reporters, your posts to bring you news, and your lords who are ready to arm in an instant. We must be the greater power. We have the narrow seas between them and us. Even if they are in Ireland they cannot be a serious danger to us. You can feel safe now, can’t you, my lord?”

“Don’t ask me, ask your mother!” he exclaims, gripped with one of his sudden furies. “You ask your mother if I can feel safe now. And tell me what she says.”

PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, SEPTEMBER 1491

Henry comes to my rooms with his court before dinner and takes me to a window bay, out of the way of everyone. Cecily, my sister, newly returned to court after the birth of her second daughter, raises an eyebrow at Henry’s warm embrace of me and his publicly seeking to be alone with me. I smile at her taking notice.

“I want to talk to you,” he says.

I incline my head towards him and feel him draw me closer.

“We think it is time that your cousin Margaret was married.”

I cannot stop myself glancing over towards her. She is hand in hand with My Lady the King’s Mother, who is speaking earnestly to her. “It looks like more than a thought, it looks like a decision,” I observe.

His smile is boyish, guilty. “It is my mother’s idea,” he admits. “But I think it is a good match for her, and truly—sweetheart—she has to be settled with a man we can trust. Her name, and the presence of her brother, mean that she will always live uneasily under our rule. But we can change her name at least.”

“Who have you picked out for her?” I ask. “For Henry, I warn you, I love her like a sister, I don’t want her sent away to Scotland or”—I am suddenly suspicious—“bundled off to Brittany, or to France to make a treaty.”

He laughs. “No, no, everyone knows that she’s not a princess of York like you or your sisters. Everyone knows that her husband must keep her safe and out of the way. She can’t be powerful, she can’t be visible, she must be kept quietly inside our house so that no one thinks she will support another.”

“And when she is married and quiet and safe, as you say—can her brother come out of the Tower then? Could he live with her and her safe husband?”

He shakes his head, taking my hand. “Truly, my love, if you knew how many men whisper about him, if you knew how many people plot for him, if you knew how our enemies send money for weapons for him—you would not ask it.”

“Even now?” I whisper. “Six years after Bosworth?”

“Even now,” he says. He swallows as if he can taste fear. “Sometimes I think that they will never give up.”

My Lady the King’s Mother comes towards us, leading Maggie by the hand. I can see that Maggie is not unhappy, she looks flattered and pleased by the attention, and I realize that this proposed marriage might give her a husband and a home and children of her own and free her from her constant vigil for her brother, and her endless anxious attendance on me. More than that, she might be lucky enough to be given a husband who loves her, she might have lands that she can watch grow and become fertile, she might have children who—though they can never have a claim to the throne—might be happy in England as children of England.

I step towards her, and look at My Lady. “You have a proposal for my dear cousin?”

“Sir Richard Pole.” She names the son of her half sister, a man so reliable and steady in my husband’s cause that he might as well be his warhorse. “Sir Richard has asked me for permission to address Lady Margaret and I have said yes.”

I overlook for a moment the fact that she has no right to say yes to a marriage to my cousin. I overlook that Sir Richard is nearly thirty to my cousin’s eighteen years, I even overlook that Sir Richard has nothing more than a respectable name, virtually no fortune, and my cousin is an heir to the York throne of England and the Warwick fortune, because I can see Maggie is bright with excitement, her cheeks blushing, her eyes bright.

“You want to marry him?” I ask her quickly in Latin, which neither My Lady nor my husband can easily understand.

She nods.

“But why?”

“To be free of our name,” she says bluntly. “To be no longer a suspect. To be one of the Tudors and not one of their enemies.”

“Nobody thinks you are an enemy.”

“In this court you are either Tudor or enemy,” she says shrewdly. “I am sick of being under suspicion.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1491

We celebrate their wedding as soon as we return to Westminster for the autumn, but their happiness is overshadowed by more bad news from Ireland.

“They have raised up their boy,” my husband says to me briefly. We are about to ride out, down to the riverside, and see if we can put up some duck for the hawks. The sunshine is bright in the yard, the court in a bustle calling for their horses. From the doorway of the mews the falconers bring out their birds, each one hooded with a brightly colored bonnet of leather, a little plume at the top. I notice one of the spit boys peering out of the kitchen door, looking longingly at the birds. Good-naturedly, one of the falconers beckons the boy over and lets him slip his hand in a gauntlet and try the weight of the bird on his fist. The boy’s smile reminds me of my brother—then I see that it is the spit boy, the little pretender, Lambert Simnel, changed and settled into his new life.

Henry whistles to his man and he comes over with a beautiful peregrine falcon, his breast like royal ermine, his back as dark as sable fur. Henry pulls on the gauntlet and takes the bird on his fist, looping the jesses around his fingers.

“They have raised up their boy,” he repeats. “Another one.”

I see the darkness in his face and I realize that this hawking trip, and the clatter of the court at play, and Henry’s new cape, and even the caress of his falcon are all part of a pretense. He is showing to the world that he is unconcerned. He is trying to look as if everything is all right. In reality, he is, as so often, embattled and afraid.

“This time, they are calling him ‘prince.’ ”

“Who is he?” I ask very quietly.

“This time I don’t know, though I have had my men up and down every corner of England and in and out of every schoolroom. I don’t think there is one missing child that I haven’t identified. But this boy . . .” He breaks off.

“How old is he?”

“Eighteen,” he says simply.

My brother Richard would be eighteen, if he were alive. I don’t remark on it. “And who is he?”

“Who does he say he is?” he corrects me, irritably. “Why, he says he is Richard, your missing brother Richard.”

“And what do people say he is?” I ask.

He sighs. “The traitorous lords, the Irish lords who would run after anything in silk . . . they say he is Prince Richard, Duke of York. And they are arming for him, and rising for him, and I shall have the whole battle of Stoke to fight all over again, with another boy at the head of another army, with French mercenaries behind him and Irish lords sworn to his service, as if ghosts never lie down but come again and again against me.”

The sun is still bright and warm but I am cold with horror.

“Not again? Not another invasion?”

Someone shouts from the far side of the yard and a little cheer goes up at some joke. Henry glances over, a bright smile at once on his face, and he laughs as if he knows what the joke was, like a child will laugh, trying to join in.

“Don’t!” I say suddenly. It hurts me to see him, even now, trying to play at being a carefree king before a court that he cannot trust.

“I have to smile,” he says. “There is a boy in Ireland very free with his smiles. They say he is all smiles, all charm.”

I think what this new threat will mean to us—to Maggie, newly married and hoping that her brother might be released to live with her and her husband, to my mother enclosed at Bermondsey Abbey. Neither my mother nor my cousin will ever be free if there is someone pretending to be our Prince Richard, mustering troops in Ireland. Henry will never trust any of us if someone from the House of York is leading a French army against him. “May I write and tell my mother of this false boy?” I ask him. “It’s distressing to have Richard’s name taken once again.”

His eyes grow cold at the mere mention of her name. His face slowly freezes, until he looks as if nothing will ever disturb him: a king of stone, a king of ice. “You can write and tell her whatever you wish,” he says. “But I think you’ll find your daughterly tenderness is misplaced.”

“What d’you mean?” I have a sense of dread. “Oh, Henry, don’t be like this! What d’you mean?”

“She knows all about this boy already.”

I can say nothing. His suspicion of my mother is one of the troubles that runs through our marriage like a poisoned stream bleaching a meadow which might otherwise grow green. “I am sure she does not.”

“Are you? For I am quite sure she does. I am sure that what funds I pay her, and what gifts you have given her, are invested in the silk jacket which is on his back, and in the velvet bonnet which is on his head,” he says harshly. “Pinned with a ruby pin, if you please. With three pendant pearls. On his golden curls.”

For a moment I can see my brother’s curls, twisted around my mother’s fingers as he sits with his head in her lap. I can see him so vividly, it is as if I have conjured him, as Henry says the foolish people of Ireland have conjured this prince from death, from the unknown.

“He is a handsome boy?” I whisper.

“Like all your family,” Henry says grimly. “Handsome and charming and with the trick of making people love him. I will have to find him and throw him down before he climbs up, don’t you think? This boy who calls himself Richard Duke of York?”

“I can’t help but wish he was alive,” I say weakly. I look over at my adorable brown-headed son, jumping up to the mounting block to his pony, bright with excitement, and I remember my golden-haired little brother who was as brave and as joyous as Arthur, raised in a court filled with confidence.

“Then you do yourself and your line a disservice. I can’t help but wish him dead.”

I excuse myself from the day’s hawking and instead I take the royal barge and go down the river to Bermondsey Abbey. Someone sees the barge coming in, and runs for my mother to tell her that her daughter the queen is on her way, so she is on the little pier as we land, and comes to meet me, walking through the rowers, who stand at attention, their oars raised in salute, as if she still commanded them, a little nod to one side and the other, a little smile, easy in her authority. She curtseys to me at the gangplank and I kneel for her blessing and bob up.

“I have to talk with you,” I say tersely.

“Of course,” she says. She leads the way into the abbey’s central garden, sheltered by the high warm walls, and gestures to a seat built into a corner, overhung with an old plum tree. Awkwardly I stand, but I nod that she should sit down. The autumn sun is warm; she has a light shawl around her shoulders as she sits before me, her hands clasped lightly in her lap, and listens.

“The king says that you will know all about it already; but there is a boy calling himself by the name of my brother, landed in Ireland,” I say in a rush.

“I don’t know all about it,” she says.

“You know something about it?”

“I know that much.”

“Is he my brother?” I ask her. “Please, Lady Mother, don’t put me off with one of your lies. Please tell me. Is it my brother Richard in Ireland? Alive? Coming for his throne? For my throne?”

For a moment she looks as if she is going to prevaricate, turn the question aside with a clever word, as she always does. But she looks up at my white, strained face, and she puts out her hand to draw me down to sit beside her. “Is your husband afraid again?”

“Yes,” I breathe. “Worse than before. Because he thought it was over after the battle at Stoke. He thought he had won then. Now he thinks he will never win. He is afraid, and he is afraid of being afraid. He thinks he will always be afraid.”

She nods. “You know, words, once spoken, cannot be recalled. If I answer your question you will know things that you should tell your husband and his mother at once. And they will ask you these things explicitly. And once they know that you know them, they will think of you as an enemy. As they think me. Perhaps they would imprison you, as they have imprisoned me. Perhaps they would not allow you to see your children. Perhaps they are so hard-hearted that they would send you far away.”

I sink to my knees before her, and I put my face in her lap, as if I were still her little girl and we were still in sanctuary and certain to fail. “Am I not to ask?” I whisper. “He is my little brother. I love him too. I miss him too. Shall I not even ask if he is alive?”

“Don’t ask,” she advises me.

I look up at her face, still beautiful in this afternoon golden light, and I see that she is smiling. She is a happy woman. She does not look at all like a woman who has lost two beloved sons to an enemy, and knows that she will never see either of them again.

“But you hope to see him?” I whisper.

The smile she turns to me is filled with joy. “I know I will see him,” she says with absolute serene conviction.

“In Westminster?” I whisper.

“Or in heaven.”

Henry comes to my rooms after dinner. He does not sit with his mother this evening, but comes directly to me and listens to the musicians play and watches the women dance, takes a hand at cards and rolls some dice. Only when the evening ends and the people make their bows and their curtseys and withdraw does he pull up his chair before the great fire in my presence chamber, snap his fingers for another chair to be placed beside him, and gesture that I shall sit with him, and that everyone but a servant, standing at the servery, shall leave us.

“I know that you went to see her,” he says without preamble.

The man pours a tankard of mulled ale and puts a small glass of red wine on a table beside me, and then makes himself scarce.

“I took the royal barge,” I say. “It was no secret.”

“And you told her of the boy?”

“I did.”

“And did she know already?”

I hesitate. “I think so. But she could have learned it from gossip. People are starting to talk, even in London, about the boy in Ireland. I heard about it in my own rooms tonight; everyone is talking, again.”

“And does she believe that this is her son, returned from the dead?”

Again I pause. “I think that she may do. But she is never clear with me.”

“She is unclear because she is engaged in treason against us? And does not dare to confess?”

“She is unclear because she has a habit of discretion.”

He laughs abruptly. “A lifetime of discretion. She killed the sainted King Henry in his sleep, she killed Warwick on the battlefield shrouded in a witch’s mist, she killed George in the Tower of London drowned in a barrel of sweet wine, she killed Isabel his wife and Anne, the wife of Richard, with poison. She has never been accused of any of these crimes, they are still secret. She is indeed discreet, as you say. She’s murderous and discreet.”

“None of that is true,” I say steadily, disregarding the things that I think may be true.

“Well, at any rate . . .” He stretches his boots towards the fire. “She did not tell you anything that would help us? Where the boy comes from? What are his plans?”

I shake my head.

“Elizabeth . . .” His voice is almost plaintive. “What am I to do? I can’t keep fighting for England. The men who came out for me at Bosworth didn’t all turn out for me at the battle of Stoke. The men who risked their lives at Stoke won’t come out for me again. I can’t go on fighting for my life, for our lives, year after year. There is only one of me, and there are legions of them.”

“Legions of who?” I ask.

“Princes,” he says, as if my mother had given birth to a monstrous dark army. “There are always more princes.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, DECEMBER 1491

As the court sets about the task of the twelve days of merrymaking for Christmas, Henry sends out a force to Ireland, in ships that sail for him from the loyal port of Bristol. They land the soldiers and bring back his spies, who ride to London and tell him that the boy is beloved of everyone who meets him. The moment that he set foot on the quayside the people caught him up and carried him round the town at shoulder height, greeting him like a hero. He has the charm of a young god, he is irresistible.

He is spending the Christmas celebrations as the guest of the Irish lords in one of their faraway castles. There will be feasting and dancing, they will toast to their victory. He will feel invincible as they drink to his health and swear that they cannot fail.

I think of a golden-haired boy with a ready smile and I pray for him, that he does not come against us, that he enjoys his fame and glory, that he decides on a quieter life and returns to wherever he came from. And as Henry escorts me back from the chapel, I take a moment while we are walking alone together to tell him that I think I am with child again.

I see the shadow lift from his face. He is glad for me, at once ordering that I must rest, that I must not think of riding out with the court, that when we move to Sheen or Greenwich I must go by barge and by litter, but I can see he is partly distracted. “What are you thinking?” I ask, hoping that he will tell me he is planning a new bedroom for me in Westminster, better rooms now, since I will be spending more time indoors.

“I am thinking that I have to make us safe on the throne,” he says quietly. “I want this baby, I want all our children, to have a secure inheritance.”

As my cousin Maggie dances with her new husband, denying her name and gladly answering to “Lady Pole,” my husband the king slips away from the court and goes down to the stable yard for an earnest conversation with a man who rides in from Greenwich, with news from France. The French king, who was already arming Ireland against Henry, is now known to be taking an interest in the boy who wears silks in that country. The French king has said that though Henry came to the throne with an army paid by France, anyone now can see that there was a York prince who should have had the throne all along. Most ominously, the French king is said to be gathering ships for an invasion force to bring the boy in the silk coat to his home: England.

My husband comes back from his secret meeting in the shadowy stable yard and his face is grim. I see his mother glance at him, and her quiet word to Jasper Tudor. Then they both look across the dancing court at me. Unsmiling, they both look at me.

PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, FEBRUARY 1492

We move to Sheen to see in the spring, but the season is a long time coming and the wind seems to howl up the Thames valley, bringing wintry rain and sometimes hard chips of hail. The snowdrops are out in the garden but they get beaten down into the frozen earth, their little white faces mud-splashed. I order big fires to be built in my rooms and I wear my new Christmas gown of red velvet. My Lady the King’s Mother comes in to sit with me and looks at the fire, piled high with logs, and says, “I wonder you can afford such wood in your rooms,” as if it is not she who sets the allowance that the king pays me, as if she does not know that I am paid far less than my mother was given when she was Queen of England, as if everyone does not know that I cannot afford great fires in my rooms but will have to scrimp and save for this luxury when the summer weather comes.

I’m too proud to complain. I say, “You are welcome to come and warm yourself in here whenever you like, My Lady,” and I smile inwardly at turning her complaint of my extravagance into my generosity. And I don’t stoop to say anything about her years in the coldness of Wales, when she was far from my father’s extravagant court, far from our lovely rooms, and never warmed by a good fire.

She looks at the blaze and then at my robe. “I am surprised Henry does not order that you ride out,” she says. “It cannot be healthy cooped up indoors. Henry rides out every day and I always walk, whatever the weather.”

I turn to where the rain is running in gray drops down the thick panes of the window. “On the contrary, he wants me to rest,” I say.

At once her look sharpens, and her gaze goes to my belly. “Are you with child?” she whispers.

I smile and nod.

“He didn’t tell me.”

“I asked him not to, until I was sure,” I say.

Clearly, she expects him to tell her everything, whether I want to share the news or not.

“Well, you shall have all the firewood you need,” she says with a sudden burst of generosity. “And I shall send you logs from my own woods. You shall have applewood from my orchards, the scent is so pleasant.” She smiles. “Nothing is too good for the mother of my next grandson.”

Or granddaughter, I think, but I don’t say the words out loud.

My cousin Maggie is with child too, and we compare our widening bellies and claim to have extraordinary fancies for foods, tormenting the cooks by saying that we want coal with marchpane, and mutton and jam.

And then we have news that makes the king happy too. The ship that carried the boy to Cork is captured, returning empty, by one of Henry’s fleet that has been cruising constantly off Ireland. The master of the ship, the silk merchant, is questioned, and though he swears that he has no idea where the boy is now, they make him confess to everything else.

Henry comes to my room carrying a mug of mulled ale and a spiced tisane for me. “My Lady Mother said you should have this,” he says, smelling at it. “I don’t know if you will like it.”

“I can assure you that I will not,” I say lazily from the bed. “She gave it to me yesterday evening and it tasted so vile that I poured it out of the window. Not even Margaret would drink it and she is as humble as your mother’s serf.”

Cheerfully, he opens the latch on the window. “Gardez l’eau!” he shouts cheerfully, and tips the tisane out into the wet night.

“You seem happy,” I say. I slide off the bed and come to sit with him at the fireside.

He grins. “I have a plan, which I want to share with you. I want to send Arthur to Wales, to have his own court at Ludlow Castle.”

At once I hesitate. “Oh, Henry! He’s so young.”

“No, he’s not. He’s six this year. He is Prince of Wales. He must rule his principality.”

I hesitate. My brother Edward went to Wales to serve as its prince, and was captured on the road as he came home for his father’s funeral. I can’t help but dread the thought of Arthur going there too, of the road running east from Wales through Stony Stratford, the village where they took our uncle Anthony and we never saw him again.

“He’ll be safe,” my husband promises. “He’ll be safe in Wales. He’ll have his own court and his own guard. And—even better than this—he’ll be safe from any pretender. I have made a little progress in this difficult matter with the capture of the silk merchant. But a little progress is better than none at all.”

“You have made progress with the silk merchant?”

“The silk merchant is proving most helpful. My advisor has seen him, and spoken with him. He has reasoned with him, and the man has changed his mind, his side, and his loyalty.”

I nod. This means that Henry’s spy has beaten, coerced, and bribed the silk merchant to say all that he knows about the boy, and now will pay him to spy for us, and the boy—whoever he is—will be betrayed. He has lost a friend and probably does not even know it. “Does he say who the boy is?”

“Nobody can say who he is. He says the name that the boy likes to use.”

“He calls himself my brother Richard?”

“Yes.”

“And did the silk merchant see any proofs?”

“Merchant Meno met the boy at the Portuguese court, where he was widely known as your brother, popular among all the lads, beautifully dressed, well educated. He told everyone he had escaped, as by a miracle, from the Tower.”

“Did he say how?” I ask. If my husband learns that it was my mother and me who put a little page boy into the Tower in place of my brother, then she will face a charge of treason and execution and my life will be ruined for he will never trust me again.

“He never says how,” my husband replies irritably. “He says that he promised not to say, until he is restored to his throne. Imagine that! Imagine a boy with the nerve to say such a thing!”

I nod. I can imagine a boy like this only too well. He used to always win at hide-and-seek because he had the patience and the cunning to hide longer than anyone else. He would wait until we were called for dinner before he came out laughing. And he loved his mother and would never put her at risk, not even to prove his claim.

“Pregent Meno now says that the boy wanted to see the world and it so happened that they sailed to Ireland. If you believed him you would think that the boy invented himself, all alone, with no backers and no money and no support. If you believed him you would have to think that Ireland, a country filled with savages wearing little more than animal skins, was an excellent market for silk, and that any clever silk merchant was likely to go there, and most likely to show his wares by dressing his page boy up like a prince.”

“But really?”

“Really, the boy must have backers and money and support. Really there must have been a plan, for Pregent Meno chose to sail with him to Ireland—of all places—and he was greeted as a hero on the quayside and borne aloft by half a dozen of the most faithless Irish lords who all happened to be there, waiting on the quay at the same time, and now lives like a king in one of their castles, guarded by an army of Frenchmen who just happen to be there too.”

“And shall you capture him?”

“I have sent Meno back to him with gold in a chest and his mouth full of lies. He will promise friendship, take him on his ship again, guarantee him a safe voyage to his friends in France; but he will bring the boy straight to me.”

I keep my face very still. I can hear the beating of my own heart. It is so loud that I think my husband will hear it in our quiet room, over the gentle flickering of the fire. “And what will you do with him then, Henry?”

He puts his hand over mine. “I am sorry, Elizabeth; but whoever he really is, whoever he says he is, I cannot have him wandering around using your name. I’ll have him hanged for treason.”

“Hanged?”

Grimly, he nods.

“What if he’s not an English boy?” I ask. “What if you can’t accuse him of treason, because he’s something else: Portuguese perhaps or Spanish?”

Henry shrugs, looking at the flames. “Then I’ll have him secretly killed,” he says flatly. “Just as your father tried to kill me. It’s the only way with pretenders to the throne. And the boy knows this as well as I do. And you know it too. So don’t look so innocent and so shocked. Don’t lie.”

BERMONDSEY ABBEY, LONDON, SUMMER 1492

Henry goes on progress to the West Country, and finds himself riding into the little town of Abingdon just as the townsmen are up in arms challenging his rule. To everyone’s surprise he is merciful. Generously he halts the trial of the townsmen, graciously he orders their release. To me he writes:

Faithless and disloyal—but there was nothing I could do but forgive them in the hope that others see me as a kind king, and that they turn away from the treasonous counsels of the Abbot Sant, who—I would swear—inspired all this. I have had every blade of grass he owns off him, and every penny from his treasure box. I have made him a miserable pauper without bringing him to trial. I don’t see what else I can do to hurt him.

While Henry is away I go to visit my mother. I ask the prior of Bermondsey Abbey if I might come to stay. I suggest that I need a retreat to consult the health of my soul, and he advises me to bring my chaplain with me on a visit also. I write to my mother to tell her I am coming, and I get a brief, warm note in reply, welcoming my visit and urging me to bring my little sisters with me. I’m not going to take them as she asks. I need to speak to my mother alone.

The first night we dine together in the hall of the abbey and listen to the reading of the sacred text. As it happens, it is that of Ruth and Naomi, a story of a daughter who loves her mother so much that she chooses to be with her rather than making her own life in her own land. I think about loyalty to one’s family and love for one’s mother as I pray that night and go to bed. Maggie, who has come with me, my most faithful and loving companion, prays beside me and climbs heavily into the other side of the broad bed.

“I hope you sleep,” I say warmingly. “For I can’t stop my mind whirling.”

“Sleep,” she says comfortably. “I shall wake twice to use the pot anyway. Every time I lie down the baby turns over and kicks in my belly, and I have to get up to piss. Besides, in the morning you will have your questions answered or . . .”

“Or what?”

She giggles. “Or your mother will be as unhelpful as she always is,” she says. “Truly, she’s a queen, the greatest queen that England ever had. Whoever stepped up so high? Whoever has been braver? There has never been a more intractable Queen of England than her.”

“It’s true,” I say. “Let’s both try and sleep.”

Margaret is breathing deeply within moments, but I lie beside her and listen to her peaceful sleep. I watch the slats of the shutters gradually lighten with the autumn dawn, then I rise and wait for the bell for Prime. Today, I will ask my mother what she knows. Today I will not be satisfied with anything less than the truth.

“I know nothing for sure,” she says to me quietly. We are seated on the benches at the back of the chapel of Bermondsey Abbey. She has walked with me beside the river, we have attended Prime together and prayed side by side, our penitent heads on our hands. Now she sinks down and puts her hand to her heart.

“I’m weary,” she says to explain her pallor.

“You’re not ill?” I ask, suddenly fearful.

“Something . . .” she volunteers. “Something that catches my breath and makes my heart race so that I can hear it pounding. Ah, Elizabeth, don’t look like that. I am old, my dear, and I have lost all my brothers and four of my sisters. The man I married for passion is dead and the crown I wore is on your head. My work is done. I don’t mind sleeping every afternoon, and when I lie down I compose myself in case I don’t wake up again. I close my eyes and I am content.”

“But you’re not ill,” I insist. “Shouldn’t you see a physician?”

“No, no,” she says, patting my hand. “I’m not ill. But I am a woman of fifty-five. I’m not a girl anymore.”

Fifty-five is a great age; but my mother does not seem old to me. And I am very far from being ready for her death. “Won’t you see a physician?”

She shakes her head. “He could tell me nothing that I don’t already know, my dear.”

I pause, realizing that I can do nothing against her stubbornness. “What do you know?”

“I know I am ready.”

“I’m not ready!” I exclaim.

She nods. “You are where I wanted you to be. Your children, my grandsons, are where I hoped that they would be. I am content. Now—never mind my death, which is bound to happen one day whether we like it or not—why have you come to see me?”

“I want to talk to you,” I start.

“I know you do,” she says gently, and takes my hand.

“It’s about Ireland.”

“I guessed as much.”

I put my hand on hers. “Mother, do you know why the French have a small army in Ireland, and why they are sending more ships?”

She meets my troubled eyes with her straight gray gaze. A nod tells me that she knows all that is happening.

“Are they going to invade England?”

She shrugs. “You don’t need me to tell you that a commander who has mustered ships and an army is planning an invasion.”

“But when?”

“When they think that the time is right.”

“Do they have a leader from the House of York?”

Her joy blooms in a smile that warms her whole face. She looks so filled with happiness that despite myself, I find I am smiling back at her radiance. “Ah, Elizabeth,” she whispers. “You know I have always thought it better that you should know nothing.”

“Mother, I have to know. Tell me what makes you look so happy.”

She looks like a girl again, she is so rosy and joyful, and her eyes are so bright. “I know that I did not send my son to his death,” she says. “In the end, that’s all I care about. That, loving my husband more than the world itself, I did not fail him in that one great act. I did not foolishly betray both his sons to his enemy. I didn’t trust like a fool when I should have been careful. My greatest joy as I face the last of my days is that I did not fail my sons, my husband, or my house.

“I couldn’t save Edward, my beloved son, the Prince of Wales, as I should have done. I told them to come quickly, and I warned them to come armed; but they weren’t prepared to fight. I couldn’t save Edward, as I should have done. It’s weighed on my heart that I did not warn him to come to me without stopping for anything. But, thank God, I could save Richard. And I did save Richard.”

I give a little gasp and my hand goes to my belly, as if to hold the unborn Tudor safe. “He’s alive?”

She nods. That’s all she will do. She won’t even trust me with a word.

“He’s in Ireland? And sailing from there, to England?”

Now she shrugs, as if she knows she did not send him to his death but what he did after, and where he is now, she will not say.

“But Mother, what shall I do?”

She looks at me steadily, waiting for more.

“Mother, think of me for a moment! What should I do if my brother is alive and he comes at the head of an army, to fight my husband for the throne? The throne that should go to my son? What should I do? When my brother comes to my door with his sword in his hand? Am I Tudor or York?”

Gently, she takes both my hands in hers. “Dearest, don’t distress yourself. It’s bad for you and for the baby.”

“But what am I to do?”

She smiles. “You know you can do nothing. What will be, will be. If there is a battle”—I gasp but her smile is steady—“if there is a battle, then either your husband will win, and your son will take the throne; or your brother will win and you will be sister to the king.”

“My brother, the king,” I say flatly.

“Better that you and I never speak such words,” she says. “But I am glad to have seen the day that you could tell me that England is waiting for the boy that I sent out into the darkness—not knowing what might become of him, not even knowing if the little boat would go safely downriver. My heart has ached for him, Elizabeth, and I have spent many, many nights on my knees for him, hoping for his safety, knowing nothing for sure. I pray that your boy never leaves you and you never have to watch him go, not knowing if he will come back again.” She sees my anxious face and her beautiful smile gleams out at me. “Ah, Elizabeth! Here you are, well and happy, two boys in your nursery and a new baby in your belly, and you tell me that my son is coming home—how can I be anything but filled with joy?”

“If this boy is your son,” I remind her.

“Of course.”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1492

Maggie goes into her confinement and gives birth to a baby boy. Tactfully, they call him Henry in tribute to her husband’s beloved king. I visit her and hold her adorable little boy before I have to prepare for my own withdrawal from court.

Henry arrives home just before I enter my confinement, and presides over the great dinner that celebrates my departure from court for the long six weeks before the birth and then the month before I am churched and can come back.

“May I send for my mother?” I ask him as we walk together towards the confinement chamber.

“You can ask her,” he concedes. “But she’s not well.”

“The abbot wrote to you? And not to me? Why did he not write at once to me?”

His quick grimace tells me that he has learned this not in a letter but as a secret from his spy network. “Oh,” I say, realizing. “You are watching her? Even now?”

“I have every reason to think that she is at the very center of the plotting of the Irish and the French,” he says quietly. “And it won’t be the first time she’s called the doctor just to send a secret message.”

“And the boy?” I ask.

Henry makes a small grimace; I can see him swallow down his apprehension. “Slipped away. Again. He didn’t trust Pregent Meno, his former friend; he didn’t take the bait I sent him. He’s gone somewhere. I don’t even know where. Probably France. He’s somewhere out there.” He shakes his head. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll find him. And I won’t talk of this with you when you are about to go into confinement. Go in with a quiet heart, Elizabeth, and give me a handsome son. Nothing keeps the boy more firmly from our door than our own princes. You can send for your mother if you wish, and she can stay with you till after the birth.”

“Thank you,” I say. He takes my hand and kisses it, then, with the whole court watching, he kisses me gently on the mouth. “I love you,” he says quietly into my ear. I can feel his warm breath on my cheek. “I wish for both of us that we could be at peace.”

For a moment I almost hesitate, wanting to tell him what I know, wanting to warn him that my mother is radiant with hope, certain that she will see her son again. For a moment I want to confess to him that I sent a page boy into the Tower in place of my brother, that among the princes who rise against him, the legion of princes, there may be one who is a true prince—the little boy who set out from sanctuary in a cloak too big for him, who had to sail away from his mother in a little boat on the dark water, who will come back to England and take the throne from our son if he can, whose claims we will have to face together someday.

Almost I speak; but then I see the pale guarded face of his mother among the smiling court, and I think that I dare not tell this suspicious family that the thing they fear most in the world is indeed true, and that I played a part in it.

“God bless you,” he says, and whispers again: “I love you.”

“And I you,” I say, surprising myself. And I turn and go into the shadowy room.

I write to my mother that evening and I receive a brief reply to say that she will come when she is well, but that just now the pain in her heart is a little worse and she is too weary to travel. She asks if Bridget can join her in the convent, and I send my little sister at once, telling her to bring my mother to court as soon as she is well enough. I pass my days in the shaded rooms of my confinement apartment, sewing and reading and listening to calming music from the lutenists who are kept on the other side of the screen, for the benefit of my modesty and of theirs. I am bored in the darkened rooms and it is hot and stuffy. I sleep lightly at night and doze during the day so that I think I am dreaming, floating between wakefulness and sleep, when one night I am awakened by a clear sweet sound, like a flute, or like a chorister singing one note very softly outside my window.

I slip from my bed and lift the tapestry to look out, almost expecting to see carolers outside my window, the sound is so pure, echoing against the stone walls; but all there is to see is a waning moon, curved like a horseshoe floating in a sea of stormy dark-headed clouds which blow past it and over it, though the thick heads of the trees are still and there is no wind. The river gleams like silver in the moonlight, and still I hear the sweet clear noise like plainsong, soaring into the vault of the sky like a choir in a church.

For a moment only I am bewildered, then I recognize the sound, I remember the song. This is the noise that we heard when we were in sanctuary and my brothers disappeared from the Tower. My mother told me then that this is the song the women of our family hear when there is to be a death of one they love very dearly, one of the family. It is the banshee calling her child home, it is the goddess Melusina, the founder of our family, singing a lament for one of her children. As soon as I hear it, as soon as I understand it, I know that my mother, my beloved, beautiful, mischievous mother, is dead. And only she knew, when she told me that she was certain that she would see Richard, whether she meant she would see him on earth or whether she was certain they would meet in heaven.

Henry breaks his own mother’s rules about the confinement of the queen, and comes himself to the screen in my chamber to tell me of her death. He is inarticulate, struggling with his duty to tell me and his fear of causing me grief. His face is fixed, expressionless, he is so anxious that I shall see no trace of the huge relief that he feels that such a dangerous opponent is out of his way. Of course, it is only natural for him to rejoice that if a new pretender emerges from the darkness of the past, at least my mother is not here to recognize him. But for me this is nothing but loss.

“I know,” I say as Henry stumbles on false words of regret, and I put my finger through the grille to touch his fist as he grips on the metal. “You need not be distressed, Henry. You don’t have to tell me. I knew last night that she had died.”

“How? Nobody came from the abbey till my servant this morning.”

“I just knew it,” I say. There is no point telling Henry or his mother about something that would frighten them, seeming like witchcraft. “You know how your mother hears God speak to her in prayer? I had something like that, and I knew.”

“A godly vision?” he confirms.

“Yes,” I lie.

“I am so sorry for your loss, Elizabeth, I truly am. I know how much you loved her.”

“Thank you,” I say quietly, and then I leave him at the grille and go into the confinement chamber and sit down. I know that he will be thinking her death makes him safer; he cannot help but be glad that she has died. Even as he puts on mourning his heart will be singing with relief. Alive, my mother was a figurehead for the York rebels, and any endorsement from her of a pretend boy would make him as good as a real prince. Her recognition of any pretender as her son would invalidate Henry’s claim to the throne. She could always have destroyed his claim with one word. He could never be sure that she would not say that word. Her death is the best thing that could have happened for Henry and his hard-hearted mother.

But not for me.

As I wait in the quiet confinement room for my baby to come, I cannot imagine what my life will be without her. I understand that her death is the best thing that could have happened for Henry.

But not for me.

I have to give birth without her, knowing that she is not even in this world thinking of me. I try to comfort myself with the knowledge that wherever she is, she will be thinking of me; I try to comfort myself with the memory of the other births when she was with me, when she held my hands and whispered to me so soothingly that it was almost as if the pains floated away on her words; but I am aware all the time that my mother has gone and these pains, and all the other trials of my life, even the triumphs, will come to me without her, and I shall have to bear them without her to comfort me.

And when the baby is born, after long hours of hard struggle, it grieves me all over again that my mother will never see her. She is such a beautiful baby, with dark, dark blue eyes and beautifully fair hair. But she will never be held by my mother, or rocked by her. She will never hear my mother sing. When they take her away to be washed and swaddled, I feel terribly bereft.

They hold my mother’s funeral without me, while I am still confined, and read her will. They bury her, as she asked, beside the man she adored, her husband King Edward IV. She leaves nothing—my husband Henry paid her so small a pension, and she paid it out so readily, that she died as a poor woman, asking me and my half brother Thomas Grey to settle her debts and to pay for Masses to be said for her soul. She had none of the fortune that my father heaped on her, no treasures of England, not even personal jewels. The people who called her acquisitive, and said that she amassed a fortune with her wiles, should have seen her modest room and her empty wardrobe chests. When they brought her little box of papers and books to my confinement rooms I could not help but smile. Everything she had owned as Queen of England had been sold to finance the rebellions, first against Richard, and then against Henry. The empty jewelry box tells its own story of an unremitting battle to restore the House of York, and I am very sure that the missing boy is indeed wearing a silk shirt that was bought by my mother, and the pearls on the gold brooch in his hat are her gift too.

Lady Margaret, the King’s Mother, comes in state to visit her new grandchild and finds her in my lap, rosy from washing, warm in a towel, unswaddled and beautifully naked.

“She looks well,” she says, her pride in another Tudor baby overcoming her belief that the child should be strapped down on her board to ensure that her legs and arms grow straight.

“She is a beauty,” I say. “A real beauty.”

The baby looks at me with the unswerving questioning gaze of the newborn, as if she is trying to learn the nature of the world, and what it will be like for her. “I think she is the most beautiful baby we have ever had.”

It is true, her hair is silver gilt, a white gold like my mother’s, and her eyes are a dark blue, almost indigo, like a deep sea. “Look at her coloring!”

“That’ll change,” Lady Margaret says.

“Perhaps she’ll be copper-brown like her father. She’ll be exquisite,” I say.

“For a name, I thought we would call her—”

“Elizabeth,” I say, interrupting rudely.

“No, I had thought—”

“She’s going to be Elizabeth,” I say again.

My Lady the King’s Mother hesitates at my determination. “For St. Elizabeth?” she confirms. “It’s an odd choice for a second girl but—”

“For my mother,” I say. “She would have come to me if she could, she would have blessed this baby as she blessed all the others. I had a hard confinement without her here and I expect to miss her for the rest of my life. This baby came into the world just as my mother left it, and so I am naming her for my mother. And I can tell you this—I am absolutely sure that a Tudor Elizabeth is going to be one of the greatest monarchs that England has ever seen.”

She smiles at my certainty. “Princess Elizabeth? A girl as a great monarch?”

“I know it,” I say flatly. “A copper-headed girl is going to be the greatest Tudor we ever make: our Elizabeth.”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1492

I come out of confinement to find that the court is filled with news of the boy who wears my mother’s silk shirts. The boy has written a beautiful letter to all the crowned heads of Christendom, explaining that he is my brother Richard, rescued from the Tower and kept in hiding for many years.

I myself, at the age of about nine, was also delivered up to a certain lord to be killed. It pleased divine clemency that this lord, pitying my innocence, should preserve me alive and unharmed. However, he forced me first to swear upon the sacred body of Our Lord that I would not reveal name, lineage, or family to anyone at all until a certain number of years. Then he sent me abroad.

“What d’you think?” Henry says grimly, dropping this smooth account into my lap as I sit in the nursery, admiring the new baby, who is feeding greedily from the sleepy wet nurse, one little hand patting the plump blue-veined breast, one little foot waving with pleasure.

I read the letter. “Did he write this to you?” I put my hand on the cradle, as if I would protect her. “He didn’t write to me?”

“He didn’t write this to me. But God knows, he’s written to everyone but us.”

I can feel my heart thud. “He hasn’t written to us?”

“No,” Henry says, suddenly eager. “That counts against him, doesn’t it? He should have written to you? To your mother? Wouldn’t a lost son, wanting to come home, have written to his mother?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

Carefully neither of us remark that this boy almost certainly wrote to her, and she certainly replied.

“Will anyone have told him that his—” I break off “—that my mother is dead?”

“For sure,” Henry says grimly. “I don’t doubt he has many faithful correspondents from our court.”

“Many?”

He nods. I cannot tell if he is speaking from his darkest fears or from terrible knowledge of traitors who live with us and daily curtsey or bow and yet secretly write to the boy. In any case, the boy should know that my mother is dead, and I am glad that someone has told him.

“No, this is his letter to the Spanish king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella,” Henry goes on. “My men picked it up on the way to them and copied it and sent it on.”

“You didn’t destroy it? To prevent them seeing it?”

He grimaces. “He has sent out so many letters that destroying just one would make no difference. He tells a sad tale. He spins a good yarn. People seem to believe it.”

“People?”

“Charles VIII of France. He’s a boy himself, and all but a madman. But he believes this shadow, this ghost. He’s taken the boy in.”

“In where?”

“Into his court, into France, into his protection.” Henry bites off his answer and looks angrily at me. I gesture to the wet nurse, commanding her to take the baby from the room, as I don’t want our little Princess Elizabeth to hear of danger, I don’t want her to hear the fear in our voices when she should be feeding peacefully.

“I thought you had ships off Ireland to prevent him leaving?”

“I had Pregent Meno offer him a safe voyage. I had ships off Ireland to capture him if he took another vessel. But he saw through the trap of Pregent Meno, and the French sent ships of their own and they smuggled him out.”

“To where?”

“Honfleur—does it make any difference?”

“No,” I say. But it makes a difference to my imagining. It is as if I can see the dark sea, dark as my Elizabeth’s eyes, the swirling mist, the failing light, and the little boats slipping into an unknown Irish port and then the boy—the handsome young boy in his fine clothes—stepping lightly on the gangplank, turning his face into the wind, heading for France with his hopes high. In my imagining, I see his golden hair lift off his young forehead and I see his bright smile: my mother’s indomitable smile.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER–AUTUMN 1492

England is arming for war. The men are mustering at Greenwich in the fields around the palace, all of the lords are calling up their men, finding pikes and axes, clothing them in the livery of their house. Every day brings ships from the weapon-masters of London with loads of pikes, lances, and spears. When the wind blows from the west I can smell the hot arid scent of the forges at work, hammering blades, casting cannonballs. Ships laden with the carcasses of slaughtered beasts come downstream from Smithfield market, to be packed into salt or smoked, and the brewery at the palace and every alehouse within a radius of twenty miles is hard at work every day, and the warm powdery scent of yeast is heavy in the evening air.

Brittany—the little independent dukedom that housed and hid Henry during his years when he was a penniless pretender to the throne—is at war with its mighty neighbor of France and has called on Henry for help. I cannot help but smile to see my husband in this quandary. He wants to be a great warrior king as my father was—but he has a great disinclination to go to war. He owes a debt of honor to Brittany—but war is the most costly undertaking and he cannot bear to waste money. He would be glad to defeat France in a battle—but Henry would hate to lose such a battle, and he cannot tolerate risk. I do not blame him for his caution. I saw our family destroyed by the outcome of a battle, I have seen England at war for most of my childhood. Henry is wise to be cautious; he knows that there is no glory on the battlefield.

Even as he is arming and planning the invasion of France he is puzzling how to avoid it, but at the end of the summer he makes up his mind that it has to be done, and in September we leave the palace in a great procession, Henry in his armor on his great warhorse, the circlet of England fixed on his helmet as if it has never been anywhere else. It is the crown that Sir William Stanley wrenched from Richard’s helmet, when he dragged it from his battered head. I look at it now, and I fear for Henry, going to war wearing this unlucky crown.

We leave the younger children with their nurses and teachers in Greenwich, but Arthur, who is nearly six years old, is allowed to ride out with us on his pony and watch his father set off for war. I leave the new baby, little Elizabeth, reluctantly. She is not thriving, not on the wet nurse’s milk nor on the sops of bread dipped in the juice of meat that the doctors say will strengthen her. She does not smile when she sees me, as I am sure Arthur did at her age, she does not kick and rage as Henry did. She is quiet, too quiet I think, and I don’t want to leave her.

I say none of these thoughts to Henry and he will not speak of fear. Instead, we go as if we are traveling on a wonderful progress through the county of Kent where the apples are thick in the orchards and the oasthouses are free with ale. We travel with musicians who play for us when we stop to dine in exquisite embroidered tents set up beside rivers, on beautiful hillsides or deep in the greenwood. Behind us comes an enormous cavalry—sixteen hundred horses and knights, and after them come the footsoldiers, twenty-five thousand of them, and all of them well shod and sworn to Henry’s service.

It reminds me of when my father was King of England and he would lead the court on a great progress around the grand houses and priories. For this short time we look like my parents’ heirs: we are young and blessed with good luck and wealth. In the eyes of everyone we are as beautiful as angels, dressed in cloth of gold, riding behind waving standards. Beside us is the flower of England; all the greatest men are Henry’s commanders, and their wives and daughters are in my train. Behind them is a great army, mustered for Henry against an enemy they all hate. The summer weather smiles on us, the long sunny days invite us to ride out early and rest in the midday heat beside the glorious rivers or in the shade of the greenwood. We look like the king and queen that we should be, the center of beauty and power in this beautiful and powerful land.

I see Henry’s head rise up with dawning pride as he leads this mighty army through the heart of England; I see him start to ride like a king going to war. When we go through the little towns on the way and people call out for him, he lifts his gauntleted hand and waves, smiling back in greeting. At last he has found his pride in himself, at last he has found his confidence. With a greater army behind him than this part of England has ever seen, he smiles like a king who is firm on his throne, and I ride beside him and feel that I am where I should be: the beloved queen of a powerful king, a woman as richly blessed as my own lucky mother.

At night he comes to my room in an abbey or in a great house on the way, and he wraps his arms around me as if he is sure of his welcome. For the first time in our marriage I turn my head towards him, not away, and when he kisses me I put my arms on his broad shoulders and hold him close, offering him my mouth, my kiss. Gently, he puts me down on the bed and I don’t turn my face to the wall but I wrap my arms around him, my legs around him, and when he enters me, I ripple with the sensation of pleasure and welcome his touch for the first time in our marriage. In Sandwich Castle, for the first time ever, he comes naked to me and I move with him, consenting, and then inviting, and then finally begging him for more and he feels me melt beneath him as I hold him and cry out in pleasure.

We make love all night, as if we were newly married and newly discovering the beauty of each other’s body. He holds me as if he will never leave me, and in the morning he carries me over to the window, wrapped in a fur, and kisses my neck, my shoulders, and finally my smiling lips, as we watch the Venetian galleys slicing their oars through the harbor water as they come in, to take his troops to France.

“Not so soon, not today! I can’t bear to let you go,” I whisper.

“That you should love me like this now!” he exclaims. “I have been waiting for this ever since I first met you. I have dreamed that you might want me, I have come to your bed night after night longing for your smile, hoping that there would come a night when you would not turn away.”

“I’ll never turn away again,” I swear.

The joy in his face is unmistakable, he looks like a man in love for the first time.

“Come back safely to me, you must come back safe,” I whisper urgently.

“Promise me that you won’t change. Promise me that I will come back and find you like this? Loving like this?”

I laugh. “Shall we swear an oath? You shall swear to come home safe, and I will promise that you will find me loving?”

“Yes,” he says. “I so swear,” and he puts one hand on his heart and the other in mine, and though I am laughing at the two of us, flushed from bed, handclasped, swearing to be true to each other like new lovers, I hold his hand and I promise to welcome him home as warmly as now when I see him set out.

“Because you love me at last,” he says, wrapping me in his arms, his lips to my hair.

“Because I love you at last,” I confirm. “I did not think that I ever would, I did not think that I ever could. But I do.”

“And you are glad of it,” he presses.

I smile and let him draw me back to the bed though the bugles outside are calling. “And I am glad of it,” I say.

Henry appoints our son Arthur as Regent of England in his father’s absence: a solemn ceremony on the deck of his ship the Swan. Arthur is only six years old, but he will not hold my hand, he stands alone, as a prince must, while his father reads out the Latin proclamation of regency, and the lords all around him go down on one knee and swear that they will accept Arthur’s rule until Henry comes home safe again.

Arthur’s little face is grave, his hazel eyes serious. He is bareheaded, his brown hair with just a glint of copper lifting a little from his face in the breeze from the sea. He replies to his father in perfect Latin; he has learned the speech from his schoolmaster, and practiced it every day with me, and there are no mistakes. I can see that the lords are impressed with him, with his learning and with the set of his shoulders and the proud stance. He has been raised to be Prince of Wales and one day King of England, and he will be a good prince and a compelling king.

Behind him I see Henry’s uncle Jasper, filled with pride, seeing his own long-lost brother in this boy’s chestnut hair and grave face. Beside him is My Lady the King’s Mother, the linen of her wimple flapping slightly in the wind, her eyes fixed on her son’s face, not even looking at her grandson Arthur. For her, Henry going to war with France is as terrifying as if she were going defenseless into battle herself. She will be in an agony of anxiety until he comes home again.

She and I stand side by side on the harbor wall, demonstrating the unity of the houses of Lancaster and York as the sailors loose the ropes on the quayside and the barges either side of the great ship take the strain, and then we hear the roll of the drum and the rowers lean into the work and the barges and the ship move slowly away from the quay. Henry holds out his hand in a salute, taking care to look determined and kingly as the ship slides from the quayside out into the water of the harbor, and then into the channel, where we can hear the waves slap against the sides, and the sails ripple as they are unfurled and fill with wind. The Venetian galleys, heavily loaded with his men, follow behind, their oars cleaving swiftly through the water.

“He’s going like a hero,” My Lady says passionately. “To defend Brittany and all of Christendom against the greed and wickedness of France.”

I nod as Arthur’s little hand creeps into mine, and I smile down into his grave face. “He will come home, won’t he?” he whispers.

“Oh yes,” I say. “See what a great army he has to lead? They’re certain to win.”

“He’ll be in terrible danger,” My Lady corrects me at once. “He will be at the forefront, I know it, and France is strong and a dangerous enemy.”

I don’t say that if that is the case it will be the first battle of his life where he has been anywhere near the front of the fighting, but I squeeze Arthur’s hand and say, “There’s no need for you to worry, anyway.”

There is no need for any of us to worry. Not me, not Maggie, whose husband rides with Henry, not Cecily, whose husband goes too; before they even land in France they are greeted by an envoy to negotiate a peace, and though Henry marches to Boulogne and sets a siege against the mighty walls, he never really expects to recapture the city for England, nor any of the old English lands in France. It was more of a gesture of chivalry towards his old ally of Brittany, and of warning to the King of France, than the first step of an invasion; but it frightens the French into a serious treaty and a promise of lasting peace.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1492

Henry comes home to a triumph of his own ordering. He is welcomed as a hero into London and then sails down to Greenwich as a victor. There are many who think that he should have fought at least one pitched battle, since he went all that way with such a mighty army. The common soldiers were spoiling for a fight and wanted the profits of a victorious campaign. The lords were dreaming of regaining their lost lands in France. There are many to say that nothing was achieved but a handsome payment from France into the king’s growing treasury—a fortune for the king but nothing at all for the people of England.

I expect him to be angered by charges of cowardice or money-grubbing. But the man who comes home to me at Greenwich is suddenly careless about his reputation. He has won what he wanted, and it is not the safety of Brittany. He does not seem to care that he did not save Brittany from the French; surprisingly, he does not even care about the cost of taking out the army and bringing them home again. He is filled with a secret joy that I cannot understand.

The royal barge comes alongside the pier that stretches out into the green waters of the river, as smartly as ever. The rowers ship their oars and raise them high in salute. There is a roll of the drum on the barge and a shout from the trumpets on land. Henry nods to the commander of the vessel and steps onshore. He smiles at the salutes from his court, puts a fatherly hand in blessing on Arthur’s little head, and kisses me on both cheeks and then on the lips. I can taste his triumph in his wine-sweet mouth.

“I have the boy,” he says in my ear. He is almost laughing with glee. “That’s what I wanted. That’s what I’ve achieved, that’s all that matters. I have the boy.”

I feel my smile of welcome dying on my face. Henry looks exultant, like a man who has won a great battle. But he did not fight a great battle, he fought nothing at all. He waves at the crowds who have gathered to see him, at the bobbing boats on the water, the cheering boatmen and waving fishermen. He takes my hand in his arm and we walk together down the pier and along the path through the garden, where his mother waits to greet him. He even walks with a new swagger, like a commander returned in triumph.

“The boy!” he repeats.

I look at our own boys, Arthur walking solemnly ahead in black velvet and Harry, just starting to toddle with his nursemaid holding his hand and veering around the path as he goes to left or right or stops abruptly for a leaf or a piece of gravel. If he takes too long she will scoop him up; the king wants to walk unimpeded. The king must stride along, his two boys going ahead of him to show that he has an heir, two heirs, and his house is established.

“Elizabeth is not very well,” I tell him. “She lies too quietly, and she does not kick or cry.”

“She will,” he says. “She’ll grow strong. Dear God, you have no idea what it means to me, that I have the boy.”

“The boy,” I say quietly. I know that he is not speaking of either of our boys. He means the boy who haunts him.

“He’s at the French court, treated like a lord,” Henry says bitterly. “He has his own court around him, half of your mother’s friends and many of the old York royal household have joined him. He’s housed with honor, good God! He sleeps in the same room as Charles, the King of France, bedfellow to a king—why not, since he is known everywhere as Prince Richard? He rides out with the king, dressed in velvets, they hunt together, they are said to be the greatest of friends. He wears a red velvet cap with a ruby badge and three pendant pearls. Charles makes no secret of his belief that the boy is Richard. The boy carries himself like a royal duke.”

“Richard.” I repeat the name.

“Your brother. The King of France calls him Richard Duke of York.”

“And now?” I ask.

“As part of the peace treaty which I have won for us—it’s a great peace treaty, better value for me than any French town, far better than Boulogne—Charles has agreed to hand over to me any English rebel, anyone conspiring against me. And I to him, of course. But we both know what we mean. We both know who we mean. We both only mean one person, one boy.”

“What will happen?” I ask quietly, but my face is chilled in the cold November weather and I feel that I want to go inside, out of the wind, away from my husband’s hard, exultant face. “What will happen now?”

I begin to wonder if the whole war, the siege of Boulogne, the sailing of so many ships, the mustering of so many men, was just for this? Has Henry become so fearful that he would launch an armada to capture just one boy? And if so, is this not a form of madness? All this, for one boy?

My Lady the King’s Mother and the whole court are waiting in rows according to their rank, before the great double door of the palace. Henry goes forwards and kneels before her for her blessing. I see the triumphant beam on her pale face as she puts her hand on his head, and then raises him up to kiss him. The court cheers and comes forwards to bow and congratulate him. Henry turns from one to another, accepting their praise and thanks for his great victory. I wait with Arthur until the excitement has died down and Henry comes back to my side, flushed with pleasure.

“King Charles of France is going to send him to me,” Henry continues in an undertone, beaming as people walk past us, going into the palace, pausing to sweep a curtsey or make a deep bow. Everyone is celebrating as if Henry has triumphed in a mighty victory. My Lady is alight with joy, accepting congratulations for the military skill and courage of her son. “This is my prize of victory, this is what I have won. People talk about Boulogne; it was never about Boulogne. I don’t care that it didn’t fall under the siege. It was not to win Boulogne that I went all that way. It was to frighten King Charles into agreeing to this: the boy as a prisoner, sent to me in chains.”

“In chains?”

“Like a triumph, I shall have him come in, chained in a litter. Pulled by white mules. I shall have the curtains pinned back so that everyone can see him.”

“A triumph?”

“Charles has promised to send the boy to me chained.”

“To his death?” I ask quietly.

He nods. “Of course. I am sorry, Elizabeth. But you must have known it has to end like this. And anyway, you thought he was dead, for years you had given him up for dead—and now he will be.”

I take my hand from the warm crook of his arm. “I’m not well,” I say pitifully. “I’m going in.”

I am not even pretending to illness to avoid him in this mood; truly, I am nauseated. I sent a beloved husband out into danger and I have prayed every day for his safe return. I promised him that when he came home I would love him faithfully and passionately as we had just learned to do. But now, at the moment of his return, there is something about him that I think no woman could love. He is gloating in the defeat of a boy, he is reveling at the thought of his humiliation, he is hungrily imagining his death. He has taken an entire army over the narrow seas to win nothing but the torture and execution of one young orphan. I cannot see how I can admire such a man. I cannot see how to love such a man, how to forgive him for this single-minded hatred of a vulnerable boy. I shall have to think how to avoid naming this—even privately to myself—as a sort of madness.

He lets me go. His mother steps up beside him and takes my place as if she were only waiting for me to leave; and the two of them look after me as I go quickly into our favorite palace, which was built for happiness and dancing and celebration. I walk through the great hall where the servants are preparing huge trestle tables for Henry’s welcome victory banquet, and I think that it is a poor victory, if they only knew it. One of the greatest kings in Christendom has just taken out a mighty army and invaded another country for nothing but to entrap a lost boy, an orphan boy, into a shameful death.

We prepare for Christmas at Greenwich, the happiest, most secure Christmas that Henry has ever had. Knowing that the King of France has the boy in his keeping, knowing that his treaty with the King of France is strong and holding firm, Henry sends his envoys to Paris to bring the boy home for his execution and burial, watches the yule log dragged into the hall, pays the choirmaster extra for a new Christmas carol, and demands feasts and pageants, special dances and new clothes for everyone.

Me, he drapes me in swathes of silks and velvets and watches while the seamstresses pin and tuck the material around me. He urges them to trim the gowns with cloth of gold, with silver thread, with fur. He wants me shining with jewels, encrusted with gold lace. Nothing is too good for me this season, and my dresses are copied for my sisters and for my cousin Maggie, so that the women of the House of York glitter at court under the Tudor gilding.

It is like living with a different man. The terrible anxiety of the early years has melted away from Henry, and whether he is in the schoolroom interrupting lessons to teach Arthur to play dice, tossing Harry up in the air, dancing little Margaret around till she screams with laughter, petting Elizabeth in her cradle, or wasting his time in my rooms, teasing my ladies and singing with the musicians, he does not stop smiling, calling for entertainment, laughing at some foolish joke.

When he greets me at chapel in the morning he kisses my hand and then draws me to him and kisses me on the mouth, and then walks beside me with his arm around my waist. When he comes to my room at night he no longer sits and broods at the fireside, trying to see his future in the fading embers, but enters laughing, carrying a bottle of wine, persuades me to drink with him, and then carries me to my bed, where he makes love to me as if he would devour me, kissing every inch of my skin, nibbling my ear, my shoulder, my belly, and only finally sliding deep into me and sighing with pleasure as if my bed is his favorite place in all the world, and my touch is his greatest pleasure.

He is free at last to be a young man, to be a happy man. The long years of hiding, of fear, of danger seem to slide away from him and he begins to think that he has come to his own, that he can enjoy his throne, his country, his wife, that these goods are his by right. He has won them, and nobody can take them from him.

The children learn to approach him, confident of their welcome. I start to joke with him, play games of cards and dice with him, win money from him and put my earrings down as a pledge when I up the stakes, making him laugh. His mother does not cease her constant attendance at chapel but she stops praying so fearfully for his safety and starts to thank God for many blessings. Even his uncle Jasper sits back in his great wooden chair, laughs at the Fool and stops raking the hall with his hard gaze, ceases staring into dark corners for a shadowy figure with a naked blade.

And then, just two nights before Christmas, the door to my bedchamber opens and it is as if we had fallen back to the early years of our marriage and all the happiness and easiness is gone in a moment. A frost has fallen; the habitual darkness comes in with him. He enters with a quick cross word to his servant, who was following with glasses and a bottle of wine. “I don’t want that!” he spits, as if it is madness even to suggest it, he has never wanted such a thing, he would never want such a thing; and the man flinches and goes out, closing the door, without another word.

Henry drops into the chair at my fireside and I take a step towards him, feeling the old familiar sense of apprehension. “Is something wrong?” I ask.

“Evidently.”

In his sulky silence, I take the seat opposite him and wait, in case he wants to speak with me. I scan his face. It is as if his joy has shut down, before it had fully flowered. The sparkle has gone from his dark eyes, the color has even drained from his face. He looks exhausted, his skin is almost gray. He sits as if he were a much older man, plagued with pain, his shoulders strained, his head set forwards as if he were pulling against a heavy load, a tired horse, cruelly harnessed. As I watch him he puts his hand over his eyes as if the glow from the fire is too bright against the darkness within, and I am moved with sudden deep pity. “Husband, what is wrong? Tell me, what has happened?”

He looks up at me as if he is surprised to find that I am still there, and I realize that his reverie was so deep that he was far away from my quiet warm chamber, straining to see a room somewhere else. Perhaps he was even trying to see back into the darkness of the past, to the room in the Tower and the two little boys sitting up in their bed in their nightshirts as their door creaked open and a stranger stood in the entrance. As if he is longing to know what happens next, as if he fears to see a rescue, and hopes to see a murder.

“What?” he asks irritably. “What did you say?”

“I can see that you are troubled. Has something happened?”

His face darkens and for a moment I think he will break out and shout at me, but then the energy drains from him as if he were a sick man. “It’s the boy,” he says wearily. “That damned boy. He’s disappeared from the French court.”

“But you sent . . .”

“Of course I sent. I have had half a dozen men watching him the moment he arrived in the French court from Ireland. I have had a dozen men following him since King Charles promised him to me. Do you think I am an idiot?”

I shake my head.

“I should have ordered them to kill him then and there. But I thought it would be better if they brought him back to England for execution. I thought we would hold a trial where I would prove him to be an imposter. I thought I would create a story for him, a shameful story about poor ignorant parents, a drunk father, a dirty occupation somewhere on a river near a tannery, anything to take the shine off him. I thought he would be sentenced to execution and I would have everyone watch him die. So that they would all know, once and for all, that he is dead. So that everyone would stop mustering for him, plotting for him, dreaming of him . . .”

“But he’s gone? Run away?” I can’t help it; whoever he is, I hope that the boy has got away.

“I said so, didn’t I?”

I wait for a few moments as his ill-tempered snarl dies away and then I try again. “Gone where?”

“If I knew that, I would send someone to kill him on the road,” my husband says bitterly. “Drown him in the sea, drop a tree on his head, lame his horse, and cut him down. He could have gone anywhere, couldn’t he? He’s quite the little adventurer. Back to Portugal? They believe he is Richard there, they refer to him as your father’s son, the Duke of York. To Spain? He has written to the king and queen as an equal and they have not contradicted him. To Scotland? If he goes to the King of Scots and together they raise an army and come against me, then I am a dead man in the North of England; I don’t have a single friend in those damned bleak hills. I know the Northerners; they are just waiting for him to lead them before they rise against me.

“Or has he gone back to Ireland to rouse the Irish against me again? Or has he gone to your aunt, your aunt Margaret in Flanders? Will she greet her nephew with joy and set him up against me, d’you think? She sent a whole army for a kitchen boy, what will she do for the real thing? Will she give him a couple of thousand mercenaries and send him to Stoke to finish off the job that her first pretender started?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

He leaps to his feet and his chair crashes back on the floor. “You never know!” he yells in my face, spittle flying from his mouth, beside himself with anger. “You never know! It’s your motto! Never mind ‘humble and penitent,’ your motto is ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! I never know!’ Whatever I ask you, you always never know!”

The door behind me opens a crack, and my cousin Maggie puts her fair head into the room. “Your Grace?”

“Get out!” he yells at her. “You York bitch! All of you York traitors. Get out of my sight before I put you in the Tower along with your brother!”

She flinches back from his rage but she will not leave me to his anger. “Is everything all right, Your Grace?” she asks me, forcing herself to ignore him. I see she is clinging to the door to hold herself up, her knees weak with fear, but she looks past my furious husband to see if I need her help. I look at her white face and know that I must look far worse, ashen with shock.

“Yes, Lady Pole,” I say. “I am quite all right. There is nothing for you to do here. You can leave us. I am quite all right.”

“Don’t bother on my account, I’m going!” Henry corrects me. “I’m damned if I’ll spend the night here. Why would I?” He rushes to the door and jerks it away from Maggie, who staggers for a moment but still holds her ground, visibly trembling. “I’m going to my own rooms,” he says. “The best rooms. There’s no comfort for me here, in this York nest, in this foul traitors’ nest.”

He storms out. I hear the bang in the outer presence chamber as they ground their pikes as he tears open the door, and then the scuffle as his guard hastily fall in behind him to follow him. By tomorrow, the whole court will know that he called Margaret a York bitch and me a York traitor, that he said my rooms were a foul traitors’ nest. And in the morning everyone will know why: the boy who calls himself my brother has disappeared again.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1493

We stay in London for the spring, so that Henry can be at the center of his spy network, receiving reports first from Antwerp and then from the city of Malines of the miracle at my aunt’s court in Flanders. Everyone is talking of the moment when her nephew came to her from France, escaped by the intervention of angels, knelt at her feet, and looked up into her face and she recognized, with an outburst of joy, her lost nephew Richard.

She writes to everyone, in an explosion of gladness, telling them that the age of miracles is not over, for here is her nephew who was given up for dead, walking among us like an Arthur awakened from sleep and returned to Camelot.

The monarchs of Christendom reply to her. It is extraordinary, but if she recognizes her nephew, then who can deny him? Who could know better than his own aunt? Who would dare to tell the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy that she is mistaken? Anyway, why should she be mistaken? She sees in this boy the certain features of her nephew, and she tells everyone that she knows him for her brother’s son. None of her dear friends, the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of France, the King of Scotland, the King of Portugal, and the monarchs of Spain, deny him for a moment. And the boy himself: everyone reports that he is princely, handsome, smiling, composed. Dressed in the best clothes that his wealthy aunt can have made for him, creating his own court from the increasing numbers of men who join him, he speaks sometimes of his childhood and refers to events that only a child at my father’s court could know. My father’s servants, my mother’s old friends escape from England as if it is now an enemy country. They make their way to Malines to see him for themselves. They put to him the questions they have composed to test him. They scan his face for any resemblance to the pretty little prince that my mother adored, they try to entrap him with false memories, with chimeras. But he answers them confidently, they believe him too, and they stay with him. They all are satisfied with their own tests. Every single one of them, even those who set out to disprove him, even those who were paid by Henry to embarrass him, are convinced. They fall to their knees, some of them weep, they bow to him, as to their prince. It is Richard, back from the dead, they write back to England in delight. It is Richard, snatched from the very jaws of death, the rightful King of England restored to us once more, returned to us once more, the son of York shining again.

More and more people start to slip away from the households of England. William, the king’s favorite farrier, is missing from the forge. Nobody can understand why he would leave the favor of the court, the shoeing of the finest horses in the kingdom, the patronage of the king himself—but the fire is out and the forge is dark and the whisper is that William has gone to shoe the horses of the true King of England, and won’t stay with a Tudor pretender any longer. A group of neighbors who live near to my grandmother Duchess Cecily disappear from their handsome homes in Hertfordshire, and travel in secret to Flanders, almost certainly with her blessing. Priests go missing from their chapels, their clerks forward letters to known sympathizers, couriers take money from houses in England to the boy. Then, worst of all, Sir Robert Clifford, a lifelong courtier for York, a man trusted by Henry to be his envoy to Brittany, packs his bags with Tudor treasures and goes. His place is empty in our chapel, his table is not prepared for dinner in our hall. Shockingly, unbelievably, our friend Sir Robert with his entire household has disappeared; and everyone knows he has gone to the boy.

Then it is we who look like a court of pretenders. The boy looks and sounds like the real thing while we pretend to confidence; but I see the strain in the face of My Lady the King’s Mother and the way that Jasper Tudor stalks the halls like an old warhorse, nervously, his hand drifting towards his belt where his sword should be, always watching the hall when he eats, always alert to the opening of a door. Henry himself is gray with fatigue and fear. He starts his working day at dawn, and all day men come into the small room in the center of the palace where he meets his advisors and his spies with a double guard on the door.

The court is hushed; even in the nursery where there should be spring sunshine and laughter, the nurses are quiet and they forbid the children to shout or run around. Elizabeth is sleepy and still in her cradle. Arthur is all but silent; he does not know what is happening but he senses that he is living in a palace under siege, he knows that his place is threatened, but he has been told nothing about the young man whose nursery this was, who did his lessons at this very table. He does not know of a Prince of Wales who preceded him, who was studious and thoughtful and the darling of his mother, too.

His sister Margaret is guarded. She is quiet as they order her to be as if she knows that something is wrong, but does not know what to do.

Their little brother Harry is starting to insist on having his own way, a stout little boy with a shouting laugh and a love of games and music; but even he is quietened by the haste and anxiety of the palace. Nobody has time to play with him anymore, nobody will pause to talk with him as they move swiftly through the great hall, busy with secret business. He looks around in bewilderment at the people who only a few months ago would always stop and swing him up to the ceiling, or toss a ball for him, or take him down to the stable to see a horse, but who now frown and hurry past.

“S’ William!” he calls to Thomas Stanley’s brother as he walks by. “Harry too!”

“You can’t,” Sir William says shortly, and he looks at Harry coldly, and goes on to the stables, so the child stops short and looks around for his nurse.

“It’s all right,” I say, smiling at him. “Sir William is just in a hurry.”

But he frowns. “Why no play Harry?” he asks simply, and I have no answer that I can give him. “Why no play Harry?”

The king deploys the whole court against the news from Malines; there is nothing more important. Lords and councillors go to Ireland at his command and speak to the Irish lords and beg them to remember their true loyalty, and not to run after a false prince again. Traitors are forgiven in a rush of generosity, and released from prison, sworn anew to loyalty with us. Old forgotten alliances are reforged. Ireland must be made secure, the people of that country must turn their hearts away from a darling boy of York and cleave only to Tudor. One of Henry’s small trusted circle goes to Bristol and starts to muster ships for a fleet to patrol the narrow seas. They have to look for ships coming from France, from Flanders, from Ireland, even from Scotland. The boy seems to have friends and allies everywhere.

“You are expecting an invasion?” I ask him incredulously.

There is a new line on his face, a deep groove between his eyebrows. “Of course,” he says shortly. “The only thing I don’t know is when. Of course the other thing I don’t know is where, nor how many they will be. Those are, of course, the only important things. And I don’t know them.”

“Your spies don’t tell you?” Despite myself, my voice has a touch of scorn as I speak of his spies.

“Not yet, no,” he says defensively. “There are secrets being well kept by my enemies.”

I turn to go to the nursery, where a physician is coming to see Elizabeth.

“Don’t go,” he says. “I need . . .”

I turn back, my hand on the latch; I want to ask the physician if the better weather will make Elizabeth stronger. “What?”

He looks helpless. “No one has tried to speak to you? You would tell me if anyone had spoken to you?”

My mind is on my sick child, I genuinely don’t understand him. “Speak to me of what? What d’you mean?”

“Of the boy . . .” he says. “Nobody has spoken to you of him?”

“Who would do so?”

His dark look is suddenly intent, suspicious. “Why, who do you think might speak of him?”

I spread my hands. “My lord. I really don’t know. Nobody has spoken to me of him. I cannot think why anyone would speak to me. Your unhappiness is clear enough for everyone to see. Nobody is going to talk to me about the thing that is driving my husband . . .” I bite off the rest of the phrase.

“Driving me mad?” he asks.

I don’t respond.

“Somebody in my court is receiving orders from him,” he says as if the words are wrenched from him. “Somebody is planning to overthrow me and put him in my place.”

“Who?” I whisper. His fears are so powerful that I glance over my shoulder to see that the door behind me is shut tight and step towards him, so that nobody can hear us. “Who is plotting against us in our own court?”

He shakes his head. “One of my men picked up a letter but it had no names.”

“Picked it up?”

“Stole it. I know there are a few men, come together for love of the House of York, hoping to restore the boy. Maybe more than a few. They worked with your mother as their secret leader, they even work with your grandmother. But there are more than these—men who pass daily as friends or comrades or servants of mine. Someone who is as close to me as a brother. I don’t know who to trust—I don’t know who is my true friend.”

I have a sudden chilling sense, Henry’s daily experience, that outside the closed door, beyond the carved panels of thick polished wood, there are people, perhaps hundreds of people, who smile at us as we go into dinner but write secret letters, store up secret weapons, and have a plan to kill us. We have a large busy court, what if a quarter of them are against us? What if half of them are against us? What if they turn against my boys? What if they are poisoning my little daughter? What if they turn against me?

“We have enemies in the very heart of this very court,” he whispers. “They may be the ones who turn down our beds, they may be the ones who serve our food. They may be the ones who taste our food and assure us that it is safe to eat. Or they may ride alongside us, play cards with us, dance holding your hand, see us to bed at night. We may call them cousin, we may call them dearest. I don’t know who to trust.”

I don’t promise him my loyalty, since there is no comfort to be had in words anymore. My name and my house are his enemies, my affinity may be massing against him; mere words will not overcome that. “You do have people you can trust,” I assure him. I list them for him, as if I am singing hymns against darkness. “Your mother, your uncle, the Earl of Oxford, your stepfather and all his kin, the Stanleys, the Courtenays, my half brother Thomas Grey—all the people who stood by you at Stoke will stand by you again.”

He shakes his head. “No, because they weren’t all beside me at Stoke. Some of them found an excuse to stay away. Some of them said they would come but delayed and were not there in time. Some of them promised their love and loyalty but flatly refused to come. Some of them pretended to illness, or could not leave their homes. Some were even there, but on the other side, and begged for my forgiveness afterwards. And anyway, even of those who were there—they won’t stand by me again, not again and again. They won’t stand by me against a boy under the white rose, not one who they believe is a true prince.”

He goes back to the table where his letters and his secret ciphers and his seals are carefully laid out. He never writes a letter now, he always composes code. He hardly ever writes so much as a note, it is always a secret instruction. It is not the writing table of a king but of a spymaster. “I won’t detain you,” he says shortly. “But if someone says so much as one word to you—I expect you to tell me. I want to hear anything, everything—the slightest whisper. I expect this of you.”

I am about to say of course I would tell him, what else does he think I would do? I am his wife, his heirs are my beloved sons, there are no beings in the world that I love more tenderly than his own daughters—how can he doubt that I would come to him at once? But then I see his dark scowl and I realize that he is not asking for my help; he is threatening me. He is not asking for reassurance but warning me of his expectation that must not be disappointed. He does not trust me, and, worse than that, he wants me to know that he does not trust me.

“I am your wife,” I say quietly. “I promised to love you on our wedding day and since then I have come to love you. Once we were glad that such love had come to us; I am still glad of it. I am your wife and I love you, Henry.”

“But before that, you were his sister,” he says.

KENILWORTH CASTLE, WARWICKSHIRE, SUMMER 1493

Once again Henry moves the court to Kenilworth Castle, the safest in England, centrally placed so that he can march out to any coast to meet an invasion, easily defended if everything goes wrong and an invasion sweeps inland to him. This time there is not even the pretence of being a carefree court in summertime; everyone is afraid, certain that they are attached to a king who is facing invasion for the second time in only eight years, convinced that a better claimant to the throne is gathering his forces against Henry Tudor: a pretender now as he always has been.

Jasper Tudor, grim-faced, rides out to the West Country and Wales to uncover the dozens of local conspiracies that are joining together to welcome an invasion. None of the people of the west is for Tudor, they are all looking for the prince over the water. Henry himself opens other inquiries, riding from one place to another, chasing whispers, trying to find those who are behind the constant flow of men and funds to Flanders. Everywhere from Yorkshire to Oxfordshire, from the east to the central counties, Henry’s appointed men hold inquiries trying to root out rebels. And still the reports of treasonous groups, hidden meetings, and musters after dark come in every day.

Henry closes the ports. No one shall set sail to any destination for fear that they are going to join the boy; even merchants have to apply for a license before they can send out their ships. Not even trade is trusted. Then Henry passes another law: no one is to travel any great distance inland either. People may go to their market towns and back home again, but there is to be no mustering and marching. There are to be no summer gatherings, no haymaking parties, no shearing days, no dancing or beating of the parish bounds, no midsummer revels. The people are not to come together for fear that they make a crowd and raise an army, they are not to raise a glass for fear that they drink a toast to the prince whose family’s court was a byword for merrymaking.

My Lady the King’s Mother is bleached with fear. When she whispers the prayers of the rosary her lips are as pale as the starched wimple around her face. She spends all her time with me, leaving the best rooms, the queen’s apartments, empty all day. She brings her ladies and the members of her immediate family as the only people that she can trust, and she brings her books and her studies, and she sits in my rooms as if she is seeking warmth or comfort or some sort of safety.

I can offer her nothing. Cecily, Anne, and I barely speak to one another, we are so conscious that everything we say is being noted, that everyone is wondering if our brother will come to rescue us from this Tudor court. Maggie, my cousin, goes everywhere with her head down and her eyes on her feet, desperate that no one will say if one York boy is on the loose, then at least the other one could be put to death and so secure the Tudor line from his threat. The guards on Teddy have been doubled and doubled again, and Maggie is sure that he does not get his letters from her. She never hears from him and now she is too afraid to ask after him. We all fear that one day they will get the order to go into his room while he is asleep and strangle him in his bed. Who would countermand the order? Who would stop them?

The ladies in my rooms read and sew, play music and games, but everything is muted and nobody speaks quickly or laughs or makes a joke. Everyone examines everything they say before they let one word out of their mouths. Everyone is watching their own words for fear of saying something that could be reported against them, everyone is listening to everyone else, in case there is something that they should report. Everyone is silently attentive to me, and whenever there is a loud knock at my door, there is an indrawn breath of terror.

I hide from these terrible afternoons in the children’s nursery, taking Elizabeth onto my lap and stretching out her little hands and feet, singing softly to her, trying to persuade her to show me her faint, enchanting smile.

Arthur, who has to stay with us until we can be certain of the safety of Wales, is torn between his studies and the view from the high window, where he can see his father’s army growing in numbers, drilling every day. Every day too he sees messengers coming from the west, bringing news from Ireland or from Wales, or from the south—from London, where the streets are buzzing with gossip and the apprentices are openly wearing white roses.

In the afternoons I take him riding with me but after a few days Henry forbids us to go out without a fully armed guard. “If they were to snatch Arthur then my life wouldn’t be worth a groat,” he says bitterly. “The day that he and Harry die is the day of my death sentence and the end of everything.”

“Don’t say that!” I put out my hand. “Don’t ill-wish them!”

“You’re tenderhearted,” he says grudgingly, as if it is a fault. “But foolish. You don’t think, you don’t realize what danger you are in. You cannot take the children out of the castle walls without a guard. I am beginning to think that they should be housed separately—so that anyone coming for Arthur couldn’t get Henry.”

“But my lord husband,” I say. I can hear the quaver in my voice, I can hear the whine of reasonableness against the clarity of a madman.

“I think I’ll keep Arthur in the Tower.”

“No!” I scream. I cannot contain my shock. “No, Henry. No! No! No!”

“To keep him safe.”

“No. I won’t consent. I can’t consent. He’s not to go into the Tower. Not like . . .”

“Not like your brothers?” he asks, quick as a striking snake. “Not like Edward of Warwick? Because you think they are all the same? All boys who might hope to be king?”

“He is not to go into the Tower like them. He is the proclaimed prince. He must live freely. I must be allowed to ride out with him. We cannot be in such danger in our own country that we are prisoners in our own castles.”

His head is turned away from me so I cannot see his expression as he listens. But when he turns back I see his handsome face is twisted up with suspicion. He looks at me as if he would flay the skin from my face to see my thoughts.

“Why are you so determined upon this?” he asks slowly. Almost, I can see his suspicions gathering. “Why are you so determined to keep your sons here? Are you riding out with Arthur to meet with them? Are you hoodwinking me with this talk of safety and riding out? Are you planning to take my son out to hand him over? Are you are working with the Yorks to steal my son from me? Have you made an agreement? Forged a deal? Your brother as king, Arthur as his heir? Will you put Arthur in his keeping now, and tell him to invade as soon as the wind turns against me and he can sail?”

There is a long silence as I realize what he has said. Slowly, the horror of his mistrust opens like a chasm below my feet. “Henry, you cannot think that I am your enemy?”

“I am watching you,” he says, not answering. “My mother is watching you. And you will not have my son and heir in your keeping. If you want to go anywhere with him, you will go with men that I can trust.”

My rage leaps up and I round on him, shaking. “Men you can trust? Name one!” I spit. “Can you? Can you name even one?”

He puts his hand to his heart as if I have rammed him in the chest. “What do you know?” he whispers.

“I know that you can trust no one. I know that you are in a lonely hell of your own making.”

NORTHAMPTON, AUTUMN 1493

We move to Northampton and Henry receives the courtiers that he had sent to negotiate with my aunt, the dowager duchess. All trade is to be banned between England and Flanders, nobody can come and go, and Flanders shall have no English wool while the boy, the one boy, holds his little court, and the determined woman who claims he is her nephew writes urgently to other kings and queens, pressing his claims.

Henry’s representatives gleefully report that they have insulted my aunt. At her very court, in her presence, they suggested that she scrapes the countryside of bastard boys to send against Henry Tudor. They made a scurrilous joke suggesting that the boy is her love child. They say she is like many older women: mad for sex, or maddened by sex, or simply mad because she is a woman and everyone knows that women’s grasp of reason is a weak one. They say that she is a mad woman from a mad family and so my grandmother Cecily Duchess of York, nearly eighty years old, and my dead mother and I, and all my sisters and my cousin Margaret are insulted too. Henry lets all these things be said by his ambassadors, and repeated in my hearing, as if he does not care what filth is thrown at York, as long as something sticks which besmirches the boy.

I hear this gossip flinty-faced, I don’t demean myself to complain. Henry is stooping very low, he has lost all judgment. To insult the boy, to insult my aunt, he will say anything. I see his mother watching me, bright-eyed with her own delirious fears, and I turn my head away as if I do not want to see her, nor hear the abuse her son commands.

But the ambassador William Warham did not waste his time in Flanders in slandering my aunt; he had his clerks and his men search the country for families who are missing a boy. Hundreds of people responded, people who now say that twenty years ago they lost a newborn from the cradle; could this be the boy? People who say that their child wandered off and never returned; did the duchess steal him? People whose beloved child fell into the river and was swept downstream and the body never found—is he alive and pretending to be Richard Duke of York? One applicant after another comes forwards to tell their sad stories of missing children; but there is nothing to link even one of them to the boy who behaves so courteously in his little palace, who speaks so warmly of his father, and who visits his aunt Margaret so comfortably.

“You don’t know who he is,” I say flatly to Henry. “You have spent a small fortune and had Sir William pay half the mourning mothers in Christendom for their stories, and you still don’t know who he is. You have no idea who he is.”

“I will have his history,” he says simply. “I will have his history even if I have to write it myself. I can tell you some of it already. He turns up somewhere, into some family somewhere, ten years ago. He’s with them for something like four years. Then Sir Edward Brampton happens by, and takes him to Portugal—Sir Edward admits that himself. In Portugal they call the boy Richard Duke of York, and he’s known in the Portuguese court as the missing prince. Then, he’s dismissed by Sir Edward, it doesn’t matter why, and the boy travels with Pregent Meno—Meno admits that too, I have it in writing. Meno takes him to Ireland, the Irish rise up for him, they call him Richard Duke of York—I have their confessions—and he escapes to France. King Charles of France accepts him as the York prince, but just when he is to be handed over to me, he escapes to your aunt.”

“You have all this written down?” I ask.

“I have signed reports from witnesses. I can trace him every moment of every day from Portugal,” Henry says.

“But nothing before then. Nothing to show that he is born and bred into the family somewhere,” I point out. “You say yourself that he turns up there. He himself will say that he turns up there from England, rescued from the Tower. Everything that you have written down, sworn to for certain, does nothing to disprove his claim. Everything you have collected as evidence only confirms him as a son of York.”

He crosses the room in one swift stride and snatches up my hand, holding it so tightly that the bones are crushed together. I flinch but I won’t cry out.

“That’s all I have for now,” he says through gritted teeth. “As I said. What I don’t have I will write myself. I will write this boy’s parentage into his story, I will create it: common people, nasty people. The father a bit of a drunk, the mother a bit of a fool, the boy a bit of a runaway, a wastrel, a good-for-nothing. D’you think I can’t write this and get someone—a drunk married to a fool—to swear to it? Do you think I can’t set up as historian? As storyteller? D’you think I can’t write a history which years from now, everyone will believe as the truth? I am the king. Who shall write the record of my reign if not me?”

“You can say anything you like,” I say levelly. “Of course you can. You’re the King of England. But it doesn’t make it true.”

A few days later Maggie, my cousin, comes to me. Her husband has been made Arthur’s Lord Chamberlain, but they cannot take up residence in Wales while the west is threatened by a rival prince. “My husband, Sir Richard, tells me that the king has found a name for the boy.”

“Found a name? What do you mean, found a name?”

She makes a little face, acknowledging the oddness of the phrase. “I should have said, that the king now says he knows who the boy is.”

“And?”

“The king says he is to be called Perkin Warbeck, the son of a boatman. From Tournai, in Picardy.”

“Does he say that the boatman is a drunk, married to a fool?”

She does not understand me. She shakes her head. “He has nothing else but this name. He says nothing else.”

“And is he sending the boatman and his wife to Duchess Margaret? So that the boy can be faced by his parents and forced to confess? Is he taking the boatman and his wife to the kings and queens of Christendom so that they can show who he truly is, and claim their son back from these royal courts which have kept him for so long?”