The White Princess

Margaret looks puzzled. “Sir Richard didn’t say.”

“It’s what I’d do.”

“It’s what anyone would do,” she agrees. “So why is the king not doing it?”

Our eyes meet, and we say nothing more.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1493

The Holy Roman Emperor has died and Henry sends ambassadors to pay the respects of England at his funeral. But when they get there, they find that they are not the only noblemen representing their country. For the Holy Roman Emperor’s son and heir, Maximilian, goes everywhere arm in arm with his new and dearest friend: Richard, son of Edward, King of England.

“They said what?” Henry demands. He has ordered me into his presence chamber to hear this report from the returning ambassadors, but he does not greet me nor set a chair for me. I doubt he even sees me: he is blinded with rage. I sink down into my seat as he strides about, shaking with anger. The ambassadors throw a quick glance at me to see if I am going to intervene. I sit like a cold statue. I am going to say nothing.

“The heralds called him ‘Richard, son of Edward, King of England,’ ” the man repeats.

Henry rounds on me. “Do you hear this? Do you hear this?”

I incline my head. On the other side of the king I notice My Lady, his mother, lean forwards so that she can see me, as if she expects me to weep.

“Your dead brother’s name,” she reminds me. “Abused by this forger.”

“Yes,” I say.

“The new emperor, Maximilian, loves the ki—the boy,” the ambassador offers, flushing over the terrible slip. “They are together all the time. The boy represents the emperor when he meets with his bankers, speaks for him with his betrothed. He is the emperor’s principal friend and confidant. He is his only advisor.”

“Oh, and what did you call him?” Henry asks, as if it does not much matter.

“The boy.”

“What d’you call him when you see him at the emperor’s court? When he’s at the emperor’s side? When he is, as you describe, so central to the emperor’s happiness, at the heart of his court? His only friend and advisor? When you greet this youth of such great importance? What do you call him at court?”

The man shuffles, passes his hat from one hand to another. “It was important not to insult the emperor. He is young, and hotheaded, and he is the emperor, after all. He loves and respects the boy. He tells everyone of his miraculous escape from death, he constantly speaks of his high birth, of his rights.”

“So what did you call him?” Henry asks quietly. “When you were all in the emperor’s hearing?”

“Mostly I didn’t speak to him. We all avoided him.”

“But when you did? On those rare occasions. Those very rare occasions. When you had to?”

“I called him ‘my lord.’ I thought it was the safest thing to say.”

“As if he was a duke?”

“Yes, a duke.”

“As if he was Richard, Earl of Shrewsbury and Duke of York?”

“I never said Duke of York.”

“Oh, who do you think he is?”

This question is a mistake. Nobody knows who he is. The ambassador is silent, twisting the brim of his hat. He has not yet been primed with the story which we have learned by rote.

“He is Warbeck, the son of a Tournai boatman,” Henry says bitterly. “A nobody. His father is a drunk, his mother is a fool. And yet you humbled yourself and bowed to him? Did you call him ‘Your Grace’?”

The ambassador, uncomfortably aware that he will have been spied on in his turn, that the reports piled facedown on Henry’s table will include accounts of his meetings and conversations, flushes slightly. “I may have done. It’s how I would address a foreign duke. It wouldn’t mean that I respect his title. It wouldn’t indicate that I accept his title.”

“Or a king. Because you would call a king ‘Your Grace’?”

“I did not address him as a king, Sire,” the man says with steady dignity. “I never forgot that he is a pretender.”

“But he’s a pretender now with a powerful backer,” Henry breaks out, suddenly furious. “A pretender living with an emperor and announced to the world as Richard, son of Edward, King of England.”

For a moment everyone is too frightened to speak. Henry’s bulging gaze holds his frightened ambassador. “Yes,” the man concurs into the long silence. “That’s what everybody calls him.”

“And you did not deny him!” Henry bellows.

The ambassador is frozen like a statue of fear.

Henry exhales a shuddering sigh, and stalks back to his seat, pauses with his hand on the high carved back, stands under the cloth of estate as if to indicate to everyone his greatness. “So if he is King of England,” Henry says with slow menace, “what do they call me?”

Again the ambassador looks at me for help. I keep my eyes down. There is nothing I can do to divert Henry’s rage from him; it is all I can do to avoid being its target myself.

The silence lasts, then Henry’s ambassador finds the courage to tell him the truth. “They call you Henry Tudor,” he says simply. “Henry Tudor, the pretender.”

I am in my rooms, Elizabeth is quiet in the cradle beside me and my sewing is in my hand, but little work is being done. One of My Lady’s endless kinswomen is reading to us from a book of psalms, My Lady the King’s Mother nodding along to the well-known words as if they are somehow in her ownership, the rest of us silent, listening, our faces composed into expressions of pious reflection, our thoughts anywhere. The door opens and the commander of the yeomen of the guard stands there, his face grave.

My ladies gasp, and someone gives a little frightened scream. I rise slowly to my feet and look to my cousin Maggie. I see her lips working, as if she is about to speak, but she has lost her voice.

Slowly, I rise to my feet and find that I am trembling so that I can barely stand. Maggie takes two steps towards me, putting her hand under my elbow, holding me up. Together we face the man responsible for my safety who looms in my doorway, neither coming in nor announcing a visitor. He is silent as if he cannot bear to speak either. I feel Maggie shudder and I know she is thinking, as I am, that he has come to take us to the Tower.

“What is it?” I ask. I am glad that my voice is quiet and steady. “What is it, Commander?”

“I have to make a report to you, Your Grace,” he says. He looks awkwardly around the room as if he is uncomfortable at speaking in front of all the ladies.

The relief that he is not here to arrest me almost overwhelms me. Cecily, my sister, drops into her seat and gives a little sob. Maggie steps back and leans against my chair. My Lady the King’s Mother is unmoved. She beckons him in. “Enter. What is your report?” she says briskly.

He hesitates. I step towards him so he can speak to me quietly. “What is it?”

“It’s Yeoman Edwards,” he says. His face suddenly flushes as if he is ashamed. “I beg your pardon, Your Grace. It’s very bad.”

“Is he sick?” My first fear is of plague.

But My Lady has joined us and she is quicker than me. “Has he gone?”

The captain nods.

“To Malines?”

He nods again. “He told no one he was going, nor where his loyalties lay; I’d have arrested him at once if I’d had so much as a whisper. He’s been under my command, guarding your door for half a year. I never dreamed . . . Forgive me, Your Grace. But I had no way of knowing. He left a note for his girl, and that’s how we know. We opened it.” Hesitantly, he proffers a scrap of paper.

I have gone to serve Richard of York, true King of England. When I march in behind the white rose of York I will claim you for my bride.

“Let me see that!” Lady Margaret exclaims, and snatches it from my hand.

“You can keep it,” I say dryly. “You can take it to your son. But he won’t thank you for it.”

The look she turns on me is quite horrified. “Your own yeoman of the guard,” she whispers. “Gone to the boy. And Henry’s own groom has gone.”

“He has? I didn’t know.”

She nods. “Sir Ralph Hastings’s steward has gone and taken all the family’s silver to Malines. And Sir Edward Poynings’s own tenants . . . Sir Edward, who was our ambassador in Flanders, can’t keep his own men here. There are dozens of men, slipping away—hundreds.”

I glance back at my ladies. The reading has stopped and everyone is leaning forwards trying to hear what is being said; there is no mistaking the avidity on their faces, Maggie and Cecily among them.

The commander of my guard dips his head in a bow and steps backwards and closes the door behind him. But My Lady the King’s Mother rounds on me in a fury, flinging a pointing finger to my kinswomen.

“We married those girls—your sister and your cousin—to men we could trust, so that their interests would lie with us, to make them Tudors,” she hisses at me, as if it is my fault that they are eager for news. “Now we can’t be sure that their husbands aren’t hoping to rise as Yorks, and their interests go quite the other way. We married them to loyal nobodies, we gave men who had almost nothing a princess of York so that they would be true to us, so that they would be grateful. Now perhaps they think that they can take their makeshift wives and reach for greatness.”

“My family is faithful to the king,” I say staunchly.

“Your brother . . .” She swallows her accusation. “Your sister and your cousin have been established and enriched by us. Can we trust them? While everyone is running away? Or will they too use their fortune and their husbands against us?”

“You chose their husbands,” I say dryly into her white anxious face. “There’s no point complaining to me if you fear that your handpicked men are faithless.”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1494

The court takes no joy in the coming of summer, and though I buy Arthur his first horse and his first proper saddle, and then have to comfort Henry, who demands a full-size horse of his own, as good as his brother’s, I cannot pretend that it is a summer as it should be, or that the court is a happy one. The king goes everywhere shrouded in silence, his mother spends most of her time in the chapel, and every time someone is missing from dinner or from prayers, everyone looks around and whispers, “Has he gone too? Dear God, has he gone as well? To the boy?”

It is as if we are players on a small tawdry stage, like players who pretend that all is well, that they are comfortable on their stools in their ill-fitting crowns. But anyone looking to the left or to the right can see that this false court is just a few people perched on a wagon, trying to create an illusion of grandeur.

Margaret visits her brother in the Tower before the court leaves London, and comes back to my rooms looking grave. His lessons have been stopped, his guard has been changed, he has become so silent and so sad that she fears that even if he were to be released tomorrow, he would never recover the spirits of the excited little boy that we brought to the capital. He is nineteen years old now but he is not allowed out into the garden; he is allowed only to walk around the roof of the Tower every afternoon. He says he cannot remember what it is like to run, he thinks he has forgotten how to ride a horse. He is innocent of anything but bearing a great name, and he cannot put that name aside, as Margaret has done, as I and my sisters have done, burying our identities in marriage. It is as if his name as a duke of the House of York will drag him, like a millstone around his neck, down into deep water, and never release him.

“Do you think the king will ever let Edward go?” she asks me. “I don’t dare to ask him, this summer. Not even as a favor. I don’t dare to speak to him. And anyway, Sir Richard has ordered me not to. He says we can say nothing and do nothing that might cause the king to doubt our loyalty.”

“Henry can’t doubt Sir Richard,” I protest. “He has made him chamberlain to Arthur. He’ll send him to govern Wales as soon as it is safe for him to leave court. He trusts him more than anyone else in the world.”

Her quick shake of the head reminds me that the king doubts everybody.

“Is Henry doubting Sir Richard?” I whisper.

“He has set a man to watch us,” she says in an undertone. “But if he can’t trust Sir Richard . . . ?”

“Then I don’t think Teddy will ever be released,” I finish grimly. “I don’t think Henry will ever let him go.”

“No, King Henry won’t . . .” she concedes. “But . . .”

In the silence between us, I can see the unspoken words as clearly as if she had traced them on the wood of the table and then polished them away: “King Henry will never release him: but King Richard would.”

“Who knows what will happen?” I say shortly. “Certainly, even in an empty room, you and I should never, ever speculate.”

We get constant news from Malines. I start to dread seeing the door of the king’s privy chamber close and the guard stand across it with his pike barring the way, for then I know that another messenger or spy has come to see Henry. The king tries to ensure that no news escapes from his constant meetings but quickly word gets out that the Emperor Maximilian has visited his lands in Flanders and the boy, the boy who may not be named, is traveling with him as his dearly beloved fellow monarch. The court in Malines is no longer grand enough for him. Maximilian gives him a great palace in the city of Antwerp, a palace hung with his own standard and decorated with white roses. His name, Richard, Prince of Wales and Duke of York, is emblazoned at the front of the building, his retainers wear the York colors of murrey—a deep berry crimson—and blue, and he is served on bended knee.

Henry comes to me as I am stepping into my barge for an evening on the water. “May I join you?”

It is so rare for him to speak pleasantly these days that I fail to answer him at all, I just gawp at him like a peasant girl. He laughs as if he is carefree. “You seem amazed, that I should want to come for a sail with you.”

“I am amazed,” I say. “But I am very pleased. I thought you were locked in your privy chamber with reports.”

“I was, but then I saw from my window that they were getting your barge ready, and I thought: what a lovely evening it is to be on the water.”

I gesture to my court and a young man bounds out of his seat; everyone else moves along and Henry sits beside me, nodding that the boatmen can cast off.

It is a beautiful evening; the swallows are twisting and turning low over the silvery river, dipping down to snatch a beakful of water and then swirling away. A curlew lifts up from the riverbank and calls low and sweet, its wings wide. Softly, the musicians on the following barge set a note and start to play.

“I am so glad you came with us,” I say quietly.

He takes my hand and kisses it. It is the first gesture of affection between us for many weeks, and it warms me like the evening sunlight. “I am glad too,” he says.

I glance at him and take in the weariness in his face and the tension in his shoulders. For a moment I wonder if I can speak to him as a wife should speak to her husband, scolding him for not taking care of himself, urging him to rest, caring for his health. “I think you have been working too hard,” I say.

“I have many worries,” he says quietly, as if he has not been on the very brink of madness. “But this evening I should like to be at peace with you.”

I glow towards him, and I can feel my smile broaden. “Oh, Henry!”

“My love,” he says. “You are always—whatever troubles I have—you are always my love.”

He takes my hand, he carries it to his lips, he kisses it gently, and I cup my other hand to his cheek. “I feel as if you have suddenly come back to me, from a long dangerous journey,” I say wonderingly.

“I wanted to come on the water,” he explains. “Where in the world is more beautiful than the river and a summer evening in England? And where is there better company?”

“The best company in England, now that you’re here.”

He smiles at the compliment and his face is warm, happy. He looks years younger than the frantic man who waits for messengers from Flanders. “And I have plans,” he promises.

“Good plans?”

“Very. I have decided that it’s time to proclaim Henry as Duke of York. Now that he’s four.”

“He’s not yet four,” I correct him.

“Near enough. He should have his title.”

I wait, my smile fading from my face. I know my husband well enough to realize that there will be more.

“And I’ll make him Lieutenant of Ireland.”

“At three and a half?”

“He’s nearly four. Don’t you worry! He won’t have to go anywhere or do anything. I’ll make Sir Edward Poynings his deputy in Ireland and send him over there with a force.”

“A force?”

“To make sure that they accept Henry’s rule. To establish our son’s name in Ireland.”

I look away from my husband’s intent face to the green banks where the swish of our oars barely stirs the reeds. An oystercatcher calls its sudden piping warning, and I can just see the little chick, pied brilliant white and glossy black like its parents, crouch down low as we go past.

“You are not honoring our little son Henry,” I say quietly. “You are using him.”

“This is to show them in Malines, in Antwerp, in Flanders, to show them even in London, in Ireland, that they don’t have the Duke of York. We have him, and his name is Henry Duke of York. He is Lieutenant of Ireland and the Irish will bow the knee to him and I will have the head of anyone who mentions any other duke.”

“You mean the boy,” I say flatly. It is almost as if the color is draining away from the golden sunset. The joy is going from the evening as the rose is going from the light.

“They call him Richard Duke of York. We will show them that we have Henry Duke of York. And his claim is stronger.”

“I don’t like our boy being used to claim a name,” I say cautiously.

“It’s his own name,” my husband insists. “He’s the second son of the King of England, so he’s the Duke of York. Certainly he must claim his name and prevent anyone else from using it. We show the world that we claim the name. There is only one Duke of York and he’s a Tudor.”

“Don’t we show the world that we are frightened that someone else is using the name?” I ask. “By making Henry a duke now? While he is still in the nursery? Doesn’t it look as if we are laying claim to a name that someone else is using? Doesn’t it make us look weak, rather than strong?”

There is a cold silence, and I turn to look at him and I am shocked to see that suddenly Henry is white-faced, and shaking with fury. By commenting on his plan I have triggered his rage, and he is beside himself.

“You can turn back,” he bellows over his shoulder to the steersman, ignoring me. “Turn back and put me ashore. I am tired of this, I am sick of this.”

“Henry . . .”

“I am sick of all of you,” he says bitterly.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1494

Two weeks of celebration follow the creation of Harry as Duke of York, two weeks in which he eats ridiculous food at great banquets, is dressed like a little king, stays up too late until he is dizzy with fatigue, then cries himself to sleep for tiredness to wake in the morning in a state of unbearable excitement to another glorious day.

Even I, critical of the mummery of this ennobling, can see how my boy Harry rises to it and relishes it. He is a most joyously vain boy; there is nothing he likes more than being the center of admiration and the focus of attention and for these days everyone praises his schooling, his strength, and his beauty, and little Harry blushes like the red rose of Lancaster under the excessive admiration.

Arthur, always quieter and more sober than his boisterous brother and noisy sister Margaret, sits beside me during the great church service when Thomas Langton, Bishop of Winchester, assists the archbishop to institute Harry as Duke of York. During the banquet, when Henry lifts Harry onto a table so that everyone can see him, Arthur only says quietly: “I hope he doesn’t sing. He’s been longing to sing for everyone.”

I laugh. “I won’t let him sing,” I assure him. “Though he does have a beautiful voice.”

I break off because Margaret, already wild with jealousy at the attention being paid to her brother, slips down from her chair and pulls at the king’s cape. Horrified, her nursemaid runs after her and curtseys low to the king and begs his pardon. But we are in public, celebrating our power. This is not the king whose heart pounds at the sudden noise of a gun salute, who falls into white-faced rage in a moment; this is Henry as he wants people to see him. This Henry does not mind his children out of their chairs, ill-mannered. This is the Henry who has learned what he must do to appear kingly in public. I taught him myself. He roars with laughter as if he is genuinely amused, and he lifts Margaret up so she stands side by side with her brother and waves at the court. He beckons to Elizabeth’s nursemaid and she holds the baby out so that everyone can see the three children side by side.

“The children of England!” my husband shouts exultantly, and everyone cheers. He throws out a hand for Arthur and me to join them. Reluctantly, Arthur stands up and pulls back my chair so that we can both go to the king where he stands, his arms wrapped around his younger children, and all six of us can take the applause as if we were playactors indeed.

Harry turns to his father and whispers. His father bends down to hear and then claps his hands for attention and everyone falls silent. “My son, the Duke of York, is going to sing!” he announces.

Arthur gives me one long inscrutable look and we all stand in silence and listen as Harry, in a sweet light soprano voice, sings “A Very Merry Welcome to Spring” and everyone taps the table or hums the chorus, and when he is done they burst into completely spontaneous applause. Arthur and I smile as if we are quite delighted.

At the end of the two weeks of celebration there is a joust, and Princess Margaret is to award the prizes. I have to order Harry from the royal box, as he cannot bear the disappointment that I will not allow him to ride in the joust on his pony, nor even parade in the arena.

“You can stand here and wave at the crowd, or you can go to the nursery,” I say firmly.

“He has to stay,” my husband overrules me. “He has to be seen by the crowd. And he has to be seen smiling.”

I turn to my sulky little son. “You heard the king,” I say. “You must wave and you must smile. Sometimes we have to do things that we don’t want. Sometimes we have to look happy even when we are sad or angry. We are the royal family of England, we have to be seen in our power and our joy. And we have to look glad.”

Harry always listens to an appeal to his vanity. Sulkily, he bows his copper head only for a moment, and then he steps to the front of the royal box and lifts his hand to wave at the crowd who bellow their approval. The cheers excite him, he beams and waves again, then he bounces like a young lamb. Beyond him, my son Arthur lifts his hand to wave as well, and smiles. Gently, unseen by the crowd, I get a firm grip of the back of Harry’s jacket and hold him still before he shames all of us by jumping over the low wall altogether.

As the jousters come into the arena I catch my breath. I had expected them to be wearing Tudor green, the eternal Tudor green, the compulsory springtime of my husband’s reign. But he and his mother have ordered them into the colors of York to honor the new little Duke of York, and to remind everyone that the rose of York is here, not in Malines. They are all wearing blue and the deep scarlet murrey of my house, the livery I have not seen since Richard, the last king of York, rode out to his death at Bosworth.

Henry catches the look on my face. “It looks well,” he says indifferently.

“It does,” I agree.

The Tudor presence is stated in the roses which stud the arena, white for York overlaid by the red for Lancaster, and sometimes the new rose which they are growing in greater and greater numbers for occasions like this: the Tudor rose, a red marking inside a white flower, as if every York is actually a Lancaster at heart.

Everyone is invited to the tournament and everyone in England comes: loyalist, traitor, and those very many who have not yet made up their minds. London is filled with people, every lord from every county in England has come with his household, every squire has come with his family, everyone has been commanded to come to celebrate the ennobling of Henry. The palace is filled, there is not a spare inch of floor in the great hall, everyone beds down where they can find a space. The inns for two miles in every direction are bursting at the seams, with four to a bed. All the private houses take in guests, the very stables host men sleeping in the hay barns above the horses. And it is this concentration of so many lords and gentry, citizens, and commoners, this gathering of all the people of England, that makes it so easy, so horribly easy for Henry to arrest everyone he suspects of treason or disloyalty, or even a word out of place.

The moment the joust is over and before anyone can go home, Henry sends out his yeomen of the guard, and men—guilty and innocent alike—are snatched from their lodgings, from their houses, some even from their beds. It is a magnificent attack on everyone whose names Henry has compiled from the time that the boy was first mentioned till now, at the moment that they were most unsuspecting, when they had stepped into Henry’s trap. It is brilliant. It is ruthless. It is cruel.

The lawyers are not alert, most of them have come to the joust as guests, the clerks are still taking their holidays. The accused men can find no one to represent them, they cannot even find their friends to post the massive fines that Henry sets for them. Henry snatches them up quickly, dozens at a time, in a city that has been lulled into carelessness by days of merrymaking into forgetting that they are ruled by a king who is never careless, and hardly ever merry.

THE TOWER OF LONDON, JANUARY 1495

We move the court to the Tower as if we are under siege, and I take up residence in my least favorite rooms, in the worst season of the year. Henry finds me, seated on the stone windowsill under a narrow arrow-slit window, looking out at the dark clouds and the constant cold rain on the river beneath the Tower.

“This is cozy,” he says, warming his hands at the fire.

When I say nothing, he nods at my ladies to leave us and they skitter out of the room, their leather shoes slapping on the stone floors, their skirts sweeping the rushes aside.

“The children are next door,” he says. “I ordered them to be housed there, myself. I know you like them to be near you.”

“And where is Edward of Warwick? My cousin?”

“In his usual rooms,” Henry says with a little grimace at his own embarrassment. “Safe and sound, of course. Safe in our keeping.”

“Why did we not stay at Greenwich? Is there some danger that you’re not telling me about?”

“Oh no, no danger.” He rubs his hands before the fire again and speaks so airily that I am now certain something is badly wrong.

“Then why have we come here?”

He glances to make sure that the door is locked. “One of the boy’s greatest adherents, Sir Robert Clifford, is coming back home to England. He betrayed me, but now he’s coming back to me. He can come here and report to me, thinking to win my favor, and I can arrest him without further trouble. He can go from privy chamber to prison—just down a flight of steps!” He smiles as if it is a great advantage to live in a prison for traitors.

“Sir Robert?” I repeat. “I thought he had betrayed you without possibility of return when he left England? I thought he had run away to be with the boy?”

“He was with the boy!” Henry is exultant. “He was with the boy and the foolish boy trusted him with all his treasure and his plans. But he has brought them all to me. And a sack.”

“A sack?”

Henry nods. He is watching me carefully. “A sack of seals. Everyone who is plotting for the boy in England, everyone who ever sent him a letter closed it under their seal. The boy received the letter and cut the seal from it, he kept the seals, by way of a pledge. And now, Sir Robert brings me the sack of seals. I have every seal. A complete collection, Elizabeth, that identifies everyone who is plotting for the boy against me.”

His face is jubilant, like a rat catcher with a hundred rat tails.

“Do you know how many? Can you guess how many?” I can tell by the tone of his voice that he thinks he is setting a trap for me.

“How many?”

“Hundreds.”

“Hundreds? He has hundreds of supporters?”

“But now I know them all. Do you know the names on the list?”

I have to bite my tongue on my impatience. “Of course I don’t know who wrote to the boy. I don’t know how many seals and I don’t know who they are. I don’t even know if it is a true collection,” I say. “What if it is false? What if there are names on it of men who are faithful to you, who perhaps wrote long ago to Duchess Margaret? What if the boy has sent you this sack on purpose, and Sir Robert is working for him, to fill you with doubt? What if the boy is sowing fear among us?”

I see him catch his breath at a possibility that he had not considered. “Clifford has returned to me—the only one who has returned to me!—and brought me information as good as gold,” he says flatly.

“Or false gold, fool’s gold, that people mistake for the real thing,” I say stoutly. I find my courage and I face him. “Are you saying that any of my kinsmen or -women, or ladies, are on the list?” Not Margaret! I am thinking desperately. Not Margaret. God send that she has had the patience not to rebel against Henry in the hopes of freeing her brother. Please God none of my kinswomen have played their husbands false for love of a boy that they secretly think is my brother? Not my grandmother, not my aunts, not my sisters! Please God that my mother always refused to speak with them, just as she never spoke to me. Please God that no one I love is on Henry’s list and that I shall not see my own kinsmen and -women on the scaffold.

“Come,” he says suddenly.

Obediently, I rise to me feet. “Where?”

“To my presence chamber,” he says, as if it is the most ordinary thing in the world that he should come to my room to fetch me.

“I?”

“Yes.”

“What for?” Suddenly my rooms seem very empty, the door to the children’s schoolroom is shut, my ladies sent away. Suddenly I realize that the Tower is very quiet and the prisons for traitors are just a half a dozen steps away, as Henry reminded me just a moment ago. “What for?”

“You can come and see Clifford brought before me. Since you are so astute about whose name might or might not be in his bag of seals, since you are casting doubt on it, you can see it for yourself.”

“It’s a matter for you and your lords,” I say, hanging back.

He puts out his hand, his face quite determined. “You had better come,” he says. “I don’t want people observing your absence and thinking anything of it.”

I put my hand in his, feeling how cold he is as he grips me, and I wonder if it is fear that makes his fingers so icy. “Whatever you wish,” I say steadily, wondering if I can get a message to Margaret, if anyone in the presence chamber will be close enough for me to whisper a request that she bring me something, a shawl or a cape against the cold of the room. “My ladies must come with me.”

“Some of them are there already,” he says. “I particularly wanted them to be there. Some of them have to be there, some of them have questions to answer. You will be surprised at how many people are waiting for us. For you.”

We enter the presence chamber of the Tower hand in hand as if we are in a procession. It is a long room that runs the length of the Tower, dark as it is lit only by narrow windows at either end, crowded this afternoon with people pressing themselves back against the cold walls to leave a space before the banked fire for the table, the great chair, the cloth of estate hung high over the chair. My Lady the King’s Mother stands on one side of the empty throne, her husband Lord Thomas Stanley beside her, his brother Sir William beside him. She has my sisters Cecily and Anne beside her, and Margaret my cousin is there too. Maggie shoots me one frightened look, her eyes dark, and then drops her gaze to the ground.

Sir Robert Clifford, Richard’s friend and loyal companion at the Battle of Bosworth and long before that day, bows as we come in. He looks strained, a leather sack like a pedlar’s pack in one hand, a sheet of paper in the other, as if he were coming to market to deal with a difficult trader. Henry takes the great chair under the cloth of gold, and looks him up and down, as if taking the measure of the man who has turned his coat twice.

“You may tell me what you know,” Henry says quietly.

My Lady steps a little closer to her son’s chair and puts her hand on the carved back, as if she would show them as inseparable, conjoined. In contrast, I find myself shrinking away. Margaret looks at me quickly as if she is afraid that I might faint. The room is stuffy; I can smell the nervous sweat of the waiting lords. I wonder who has good reason to be fearful. I look from Cecily to Anne to Margaret and wonder if they are about to be entrapped. Sir Robert Clifford dabs his damp upper lip.

“I have come straight from the court . . .” he starts.

“It’s not a court,” Henry corrects him.

“From . . .”

“From the feigned lad Warbeck.” Henry speaks for him.

“Warbeck?” Sir Robert hesitates as if to confirm the name, as if he has never heard it before.

Irritated, my husband raises his voice. “Warbeck! Of course! Warbeck! That’s his name, for God’s sake!”

“With this.” Sir Robert holds out the sack.

“The seals of the traitors,” Henry prompts him.

Sir Robert is pale. He nods. “The proof of their treachery.”

“Cut from their treasonous letters to the boy.”

Sir Robert nods nervously.

“You may show me. Show me one at a time.”

Sir Robert steps up to the table, within reach of the king, and I see Jasper Tudor raise himself up on his toes, as if he is ready to spring forwards and defend his nephew against some trick. They are afraid, even now, even in the heart of the Tower, that Henry may be attacked.

It is like a children’s game as Sir Robert plunges his hand in the bag and hands over the first seal. Henry takes it, turns it around in his hand. “Cressener,” he says shortly.

There is a little murmur from one corner of the court, where the absent young man’s kinsmen are standing. They look utterly shocked. A man drops to his knees. “Before God, I knew nothing of it,” he says.

Henry just looks at him, as the clerk behind him makes a note on a sheet of paper. Henry holds out his hand for another seal. “Astwood,” he says.

“Never!” a woman exclaims, and then bites back the denial, realizing that she does not want to be seen defending a traitor.

Henry holds out his hand, disregarding the gasp from the lords. I see the seal as it comes from the bag, almost as if by magic, as if I suddenly have the eyes of a hawk that can see far, far below the crouching mouse, the dash of a pheasant chick. As Sir Robert hands over the small red seal, I recognize the imprint of my mother’s ring.

Sir Robert knows it too. He hands it over without saying a name, and Henry takes it without comment, turns and looks at me, his gaze absolutely expressionless, his dark eyes as flat and unloving as Welsh slate. Silently, he puts it on the table, beside the seals of the other traitors. Uncle Jasper glares at me, and his mother turns her face away. I meet my sister Cecily’s frightened gaze but I dare not signal to her to say nothing. I keep my face perfectly still; the most important thing is that we none of us confess to anything.

Another seal comes from the bag. I find I am holding my breath as if preparing for something yet more terrible. Henry puts it on the table without saying the name, and the whole of the court cranes forwards as if they would read it, despite him.

“Dorlay,” he says bitterly. There is a low moan from one of my ladies as he names her brother.

Sir Robert passes another seal from the bag, and I hear My Lady gasp in horror. She reels back, grips the chair to steady herself as Henry rises to his feet. His hand is on the seal, I can’t see the inscription, and for a moment, in my terror, I think he will turn to me, I think he will name me as a traitor. I think it is my seal in his hand. The court is breathless, looking from the king’s shocked face to the pallor of his mother. Whatever Henry was planning in this ordeal, it was not that he should find this seal in the bag. His hand shakes as he holds out the seal with the familiar crest.

“Sir William?” he asks, and his voice falters as he looks past his mother to her brother-in-law, the trusted beloved brother of her husband, whose army saved Henry’s life at Bosworth, who handed him the crown of England and was made Lord Chamberlain, the highest position in the kingdom, and given a fortune as a mere part of his reward. “Sir William Stanley?” he repeats, disbelievingly. “This is your seal?”

“It’s not possible,” Thomas, Lord Stanley, says hastily.

Terribly, at that moment, a laugh forces its way out of my mouth. I am so horrified and so shocked and so startled that I laugh like a fool and bury my face in my hands and find I cannot catch my breath for wanting to laugh, laugh out loud at the madness of this moment. I choke and peal after peal of laughter escapes me.

It is because I see, so blindingly clearly, that yet again the Stanleys have put a man on either side, as they always do, as my mother herself warned me they always do. There is always a Stanley on either side of the battle, or one who has sworn he is on his way, or one promising an army but unfortunately failing to deliver. Whenever there is a moment that a family must choose a side, the Stanleys are always to be found on both sides at once.

Even at Bosworth, though they were to be found on the winning side at the very end, they had promised their loyalty and their army to Richard. At the start of the day they were sworn to be his allies. Richard even had Thomas Stanley’s son as a hostage, to prove their goodwill. He was certain they would ride to his aid even as they waited on the hill to see which way the battle was going, and then thundered down to support Henry.

And now, they have done it again. “Sans changer!” I choke. “Sans changer!”

It is the Stanley motto: never changing. But they are only unchanging in the pursuit of their own safety and success, and then I feel Maggie at my side and her fingers pinching the inside of my arm as she whispers urgently, “Stop it! Stop it!” and I bite the back of my hand and choke into silence.

But as my laughter drains away, I realize how powerful “the boy” has become. If the Stanleys have divided—one to Henry’s side, one to the boy’s—then they must know that he will invade and they must think that he might win. To have a Stanley on your side is like a pedigree—it shows that your claim is a good one. They only ever join a winning side. If Sir William is backing the boy it is only because he thinks he will triumph. If Lord Thomas has allowed it, it is because he thinks the boy has a good chance and a better claim.

Henry glances at me as I struggle to compose myself. He turns back to Sir William and his face is blank. “I gave you everything you asked for,” he says flatly, as though loyalty should be bought.

Sir William inclines his head.

“You yourself handed the crown of England to me on the battlefield.”

It is terrible how the people have fallen away from Sir William as if they have suddenly seen on him the pockmarks of the plague. Without seeming to move, everyone has receded from him by a clear pace and he stands alone, facing the king’s horrified gaze.

“You are my stepfather’s brother, I have treated you as an uncle.” Henry looks at his mother. She is swallowing convulsively as if bile is rising in her throat and she is going to vomit. “My mother assured me that you were her kinsman, you were a man we could trust.”

“A mistake,” Thomas, Lord Stanley, says. “Sir William can explain, I know . . .”

“There are forty important men promised with him,” Sir Robert prompts unasked. “He has recruited supporters. Between them they have sent the boy a fortune.”

“You are of the royal family of England and yet you side with a pretender?” Henry struggles with the words as if he cannot believe that he is saying this to his uncle. He had thought to shame me with the proof of my mother’s disloyalty, he had thought to shock the court with half a dozen names that he would send to the hangman to teach the others to be loyal in future. He did not think that in this theater of asserting his power he would find a traitor in his own family. I look at his mother, who is clinging to the back of his chair as her knees give way beneath her, looking with staring eyes from her husband to his brother as if they are equally faithless. At that horror-stricken glance from her I realize that they probably are. The brothers never act without each other. Perhaps they decided that Sir William would back the pretender and Thomas, Lord Stanley, maintain his fatherhood of the king. Both of them waiting to see who would win. Both of them determined to be on the winning side. Both of them judging that Henry Tudor was likely to lose.

“Why?” he asks brokenly. “Why would you betray me? Me! After you supported me? Me! Who gave you everything?”

Then I see him snap off the questions, as he hears in his own voice the weakness in his tone. It is the whine of a boy who was never loved, who was always in exile hoping one day to come home. The boy who could never understand why he should be far from his mother, why he should have no friends, why he should live in a foreign land and have only enemies at home. Henry remembers that there are some questions which should never be asked.

The last thing he wants his court to hear is why Sir William was ready to risk everything for the boy, to throw away everything he had gained from the king. Why Sir William would take that choice could only be for a residual love and loyalty for the House of York, and his belief that the boy is the true heir. Henry doesn’t want to hear this. The last thing he should invite is a justification from the Stanleys. Who knows how many people would agree with them? He slams his hand flat on the table. “I won’t hear a word from you.”

Sir William shows no intention of speaking. His face is pale and proud. I can’t look at him without thinking that he knows his cause is a good one. He is following a true king.

“Take him away,” Henry says to the guards at the door and they step forwards and Sir William goes with them without a word. He does not ask for mercy and he does not try to explain. He goes with his head held high, as if he knows he will have to pay the price for doing the right thing. I have never seen him, in all my life before, walk like a proud man. I have always thought of him as a turncoat, one who would go from one side to the other for the winnings. But today, as they take him out as a traitor, when he is going to his death, when he is utterly lost for supporting the boy who says he is my brother—Sir William goes gladly, his head held high.

Sir Robert, whose family lands were confiscated by Sir William and who has borne him a grudge since then, watches him go with a broad smile, and reaches into the sack of seals as if to give us all another surprise.

“Enough,” Henry says, looking as sick as his mother. “I will inspect them on my own, in my rooms. You can go. You can all go. I want no one—” He breaks off and looks past me as if I am the last person who might give him comfort in this moment of betrayal. “I want none of you.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, FEBRUARY 1495

Henry’s suspicion of me and all Yorks drives him onwards to find a husband that he can trust who can marry my sister Anne and thus eliminate her as a center for rebellion. His choice falls on Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, who has been punished long enough for being loyal to the House of York and is released from the Tower. He was Richard’s man; but made it clear to Henry that his loyalty was always only to the crown. Once the crown was on Henry’s head he followed it. Henry has doubted this, and suspected him, but his faithful waiting in the Tower, like a dog for the return of his master, has convinced Henry to take the risk. So Thomas is betrothed to my sister Anne, takes his title back into his hand, and has every reason to think that the Howard dynasty will rise under the Tudors as it was set to do under the Yorks.

“Do you mind?” I ask Anne.

She gives me one level look. She is nineteen, and has been proposed as a bride all around Christendom.

“It’s time,” she says shortly. “And it could be worse. Thomas Howard is a coming man, he will rise in the king’s favor. You’ll see. He’ll do anything for him.”

Henry wastes little time on the wedding that he has ordered; he can think of nothing but the sack of seals and the names of the men who have been betraying him ever since he took the crown on his head.

Jasper Tudor, the only man in the world that Henry can trust, heads a commission to try the traitors and with eleven lords and eight judges, drags into court anyone who has ever spoken of the boy or whispered the name Prince Richard. Before Jasper come priests, clerks, officials, lords, their families, servants, sons, a terrible parade of men who had taken the Tudor shilling, sworn the Tudor oaths of loyalty, but then decided that the boy was the true king. Despite their position, despite the wealth that Henry had given them, these lords have gone against their own interests, drawn to the boy as if they could not help themselves, following a brighter star than their own selfish good. They are like martyrs for the House of York, pledging their faith, gambling their own safety, sending words of love and loyalty in their own hands sealed with their family crests.

They pay a heavy price. The lords are publicly beheaded, the common men hanged, gutted while they are still alive, their bellies and their lungs dragged out of their sliced bodies and burned before their glaring eyes, then finally they die as they are cut into pieces, quartered like a carcass, their mangled bodies sent around the kingdom to be displayed at city gates, at crossroads, at village squares.

From this, Henry hopes that his country will learn loyalty. But I recognize—knowing this country as I do, and he does not—that all the people will learn is that good men, wise men, wealthy men, men as privileged as Sir William Stanley, men as knowing and as cunning as the king’s own uncle, are ready to die for the boy. All they will judge from the many deaths and the festering body parts is that many, many good men believed in the boy, and were ready to die for him.

Stanley goes to the scaffold in silence neither begging for mercy nor offering to unmask other traitors. There is no way that he could declare more loudly that he thinks the boy is the true king and that Tudor is a pretender, that Tudor was always a pretender, today as on the day of the battle of Bosworth Field. Nothing could ring out more clearly than Stanley’s silence, nothing publishes the boy’s claims more strongly than the grinning skulls of his adherents on the gates of every town of England, making everyone wonder at the cause for which these men died so terribly.

Henry sends out commissions to seek for traitors in every county of England. He thinks they will root out treason. I think that all they will do, wherever they go, is prove to the people that the king thinks there is treason everywhere. All Henry tells the market towns when his yeomen of the guard march in and set up a hearing for the local gossips is that their king is afraid of everyone, even the tongue-waggers in the alehouses. All he demonstrates is that their king is afraid of almost everything, like a child dreading the darkness at bedtime who imagines threats everywhere.

Jasper Tudor comes back to Westminster after scouring the country for treason, looking exhausted, gray with fatigue. He is a man of sixty-three, who thought he had brought his beloved nephew to the throne in a blaze of courage nearly a decade ago, and that the great task of his life was done. Now he finds that for every man who died on the battlefield fighting against them, there are ten enemies in hiding, twenty, a hundred. York was never defeated, it just stepped back into the shadows. For Jasper, who fought all his life against York, who suffered exile from his own beloved country for nearly twenty-five years, it is as if his great victory over the House of York has never happened. York is stepping forwards again and Jasper has to find his courage, find his power, and ready himself for another battle. But now he is an old man.

His wife, my aunt Katherine, sends him out on his mission with an obedient curtsey and a hard face. Half the people he will arrest and see hanged are loyal servants of our house and personal friends to her. But My Lady the King’s Mother, who has loved him, I believe, ever since she was a young widow and he was her only friend, looks at him with hollow eyes, as if she would drop to her knees before him and beg him to save her boy again, as he has saved him so often before. They shrink into themselves, the king, his mother and his uncle, trusting no one else now.

Thomas, Lord Stanley, whose loveless marriage to My Lady the King’s Mother brought him to greatness and brought an army to her son, is excluded from their councils, as if he shares a taint of treason with his dead brother. If they cannot trust the brother-in-law of My Lady the King’s Mother, if they cannot trust her husband, if they cannot trust their own kinsmen that they have loaded with honor and money, then who can they trust?

They can trust no one, they fear everyone.

Henry never comes to my rooms in the evenings anymore. Terrified of a boy, he cannot think of making another child. We have the heirs that he needs: our own boy and his little brother. Henry looks at me as if he cannot contemplate making another child on me, one that would be half York, one that would be half traitor by birth. All the warmth, all the tenderness that was growing between us is frozen out by his terror and mistrust. As his mother looks at me askance, as the king puts out his hand to lead me in to dinner but hardly touches my fingers, I walk like the traitor Sir William: with my head up, as if I refuse to feel shame.

I see the eyes of the court upon me all the time, but I dare not meet their eyes and smile. I cannot judge who might smile at me, thinking that I am the cruelly treated wife of a husband who has lost once again his new habit of kindness, a man who has been told all his life that he should be king and now doubts it more than ever before. Or perhaps they are smiling at me because they are undetected, and think I am hidden too. Perhaps they are plotting treason and think I am with them. Perhaps they are smiling at me because they saw my mother’s seal in the traitor’s sack, and believe that my own seal was hidden away, lower down in the bag.

I think of the boy in Malines, the boy with golden-brown hair and hazel eyes, and imagine him walking like me, with his head up, as we children of York were taught to do. I think of him learning of the loss of the treasure, of the sack of seals; a crushing blow to his plans, the betrayal of his allies. They say that he expressed regret that Sir Robert had betrayed him, but that he did not curse or swear. He did not gulp as if he might be sick, and order everyone from the room. He behaved like a boy who was taught by a loving mother that the wheel of fortune may well turn against you, and there is no point in railing against it, or wishing it otherwise. He took the bad news like a prince of York, not like a Tudor.

WORCESTER CASTLE, SUMMER 1495

Nobody will tell me what is happening. I walk in a circle of silence, as if I am held like a leech in a jar of thick glass. Henry comes to my rooms but hardly speaks to me. He gets into my bed and does his duty as if he were visiting a brothel, a stewhouse; we have lost all the love that was growing between us. Now he wants to make another Tudor to have as a reserve against the boy. He has consulted astronomers and they think that a third Tudor prince would make his throne more secure. It seems that two heirs and one of them proclaimed as the Duke of York is not enough for him. We need to hide behind a wall of babies, and Henry will get them on me for necessity but not for love.

In July I tell him that I have missed my course and am with child again, and he nods silently; even this news cannot bring him joy. He stops coming to my room as a man released from a duty and I am glad to sleep with the companionship of one of my sisters, or with Margaret, who is at court while her husband scours the east of England for hidden traitors. I have lost the desire to lie with my husband, his touch is cold and his hands are bloody. His mother looks at me as if she would call the yeomen of the guard to arrest me for nothing more than my name.

Jasper Tudor is never here at court anymore, but is always riding to get reports from the east coast, where they are certain that the boy will land, from the North, where they think the Scots will invade with the white rose on their banners, or from the west, where Henry’s attempts to crush the Irish has rebounded on him and the people are angrier and more rebellious than ever before.

I spend most of my time in the nursery with my children. Arthur studies with his schoolmasters and every afternoon is ordered out into the tilt yard to master his horse and to learn his skills with lance and sword. Margaret is quick with her lessons and quick in her temper; she will snatch a book from her brothers and run and lock herself in a room before they can shout and chase after her. Elizabeth is as light as a feather, a little baby as pale as snow. They tell me she will fatten up soon, she will be as strong as her brothers and sister, but I don’t believe them. Henry is preparing a betrothal for her, he is desperate to make an alliance with France and will use this little treasure, this child of porcelain, to make a treaty. He will use her as fresh bait to catch the boy. I don’t argue with him. I cannot worry now about her wedding in twelve years’ time, I can only think that this day she has eaten nothing but a little bread and some milk, some fish at dinnertime, no meat at all.

My little boy Henry is bright and willing, quick to learn but easily distracted, a child born for play. He is to go into the Church, and I seem to be the only one who thinks this is ridiculous. My Lady the King’s Mother plans he will be a cardinal like her great friend and ally John Morton. She prays that he will rise through the Church and become a pope, a Tudor pope. It is pointless to tell her that he is a worldly child who loves sport and play and music and food with a most unclerical relish. It does not matter to her. With Arthur as King of England and Henry as Pope in Rome she will have this world and the next in the hands of Tudors and God will have fulfilled the promise he made her when she was a frightened little girl who feared that her son would never rule anything but a couple of castles in Wales and would shortly be driven, by my father, from them.

Her great friend John Morton stays in the south of England, as we spend our summer here in the center of the country, far from the dangerous coast, close to Coventry Castle. Morton is guarding the south coast for My Lady’s fearful son, who goes to and from the court without warning, as if he is riding his own patrols, as if he cannot even trust his spies anymore, but has to see everything for himself. We never know if he will attend dinner, we never know if he will sleep in his own bed; and when his throne is empty the courtiers look around as if for another king who could be seated there. Now the Tudors trust no one but the handful of people who fled with them into exile long ago. Their world has shrunk to the tiny court that hid with them in Brittany; it is as if all the allies and the friends they made, and all the guards and soldiers they recruited after the battle of Bosworth, had never joined them, as if they have no support at all.

It is the court of a frightened pretender and there is no majesty or pride or confidence about it. Working alone, I can do nothing, when I process on my own to dinner with my head held high, smiling around at friends and suspects alike, trying on my own to overcome the impression that the king is afraid and his court are uncertain.

Then, one evening, John Kendal, the Bishop of Worcester, stops me on my way to my rooms with a kindly smile, and asks me, as a man offering to show a rainbow or a pretty sunset: “Have you seen the light from the beacons, Your Grace?”

I hesitate. “Beacons?”

“The sky is quite red.”

I turn to the arrow-slit window in the castle and look out. To the south the sky is quite rosy, and as far as I can see there is a light on a hill, and then another, and then another behind and behind one after another all the way until I can see nothing more.

“What is it?”

“The king commanded beacons to warn him of the landing of Richard of York,” John Kendal says.

“You mean the pretender,” I remind him. “The boy.”

In the glow of the lights I catch his hidden smile and I hear his low laugh. “Of course. I forgot his name. These are the beacons. He must have landed.”

“Landed?”

“These are his beacons. The boy is coming home.”

“The boy is coming home?” I repeat like a fool. It cannot be that I have mistaken the bishop’s delight in the rosy light of the beacons. He is illuminated with joy as if the beacons were welcoming flares to guide ships safely into port. He smiles at me to share his delight that the Plantagenet boy is homeward bound.

“Yes,” he says. “They are lighting his way home at last.”

Next day Henry thunders out of the castle surrounded by his guard, without a word of farewell to me, riding west to raise troops, visiting castles in the Stanley areas, desperate to keep them loyal, uncertain of them all. He does not even say good-bye to the children in the nursery or go to his mother for her blessing. She is horrified by his sudden departure and spends all her time on her knees on the stone floor of the chapel at Worcester, not even coming to breakfast, for she is fasting, starving herself to draw down a blessing on her son. Her thin neck at the top of her gown is red and raw, as she is wearing a hair shirt against her skin to mortify her paper-thin flesh. Jasper Tudor rides beside Henry, like a tired old warhorse that does not know how to stop and rest.

Confused rumors come back to us. The boy has landed in the east of the country, coming into England through Hull and York, as my father did when he returned in triumph from his exile. The boy is following in King Edward’s footsteps as his true son and heir.

Then we hear that the winds blew the boy off course and he has landed in the south of England and there is nobody there to defend the coast but the archbishop and some local bands. What shall prevent the boy from marching on London? There is no one to block the road, there is no one who will deny him.

Henry’s guard rides into the stable yard without warning, and the grooms brush down the exhausted horses and the men stained with mud from the road take the back stairs to their rooms in silence. They don’t shout for ale or boast of their journey, they return to the court like men silent with grim determination, afraid of defeat. Henry dines with the court for two nights, hard-faced, as if he has forgotten all his lessons about being a smiling king. He comes to my rooms to lead me in to dinner and greets me curtly.

“He landed.” He spits out the words as he leads me to the top table. “He got a few men onshore. But he saw the defense and sheered off like a coward. My men killed a few hundred of them, but like fools they let his ship get away. He fled like a boy and they let him go.”

I don’t remind my husband that once he too came to the coast and saw that there was a trap and sailed away without landing. We called him a coward then, too. “So where is he now?”

He looks at me coldly, as if measuring whether it is safe to tell me. “Who knows? Perhaps he’s gone to Ireland? The winds were blowing west, so I doubt he’ll have landed in Wales. Wales at least should be faithful to a Tudor. He’ll know that.”

I say nothing. We both know that he can trust nowhere to be faithful to a Tudor. I hold out my hands and the groom of the ewery pours warm water on my fingers and holds out a scented towel.

Henry rubs his hands and throws the towel at a page boy. “I captured some of his men,” he says with sudden energy. “I have about a hundred and sixty of them, Englishmen and foreigners, all traitors and rebels.”

I don’t need to ask what will happen to the men who sailed with the boy for England. We take our seats and face our court.

“I shall send them round the country and have them hanged in groups in every market town,” Henry says with sudden cold energy. “I shall show people what happens to anyone who turns against me. And I shall try them for piracy—not treason. If I name them as pirates I can kill the foreigners as well. Frenchman and Englishman can hang side by side and everyone will look at their rotting bodies and know that they dare not question my rule no matter where they were born.”

“You won’t forgive them?” I ask, as they pour a glass of wine. “Not any of them? You won’t show mercy? You always say that it is politic to show mercy.”

“Why in hell’s name should I forgive them? They were coming against me, against the King of England. Armed and hoping to overthrow me.”

I bow my head under his fury and know that the court is watching Henry’s rage.

“But the ones that I execute in London will die as pirates do,” he says with sudden harsh relish. His temper vanishes, he beams at me.

I shake my head. “I don’t know what you mean,” I say wearily. “What have you advisors been telling you now?”

“They’ve been telling me how pirates are punished,” he says with a cruel joy. “And this is how I will have these men killed. I will have them tied down by St. Katherine’s Wharf at Wapping. They are traitors and they came against me by sea. I shall find them guilty of piracy and they will be tied down and the tide will come in and slowly, slowly, creep over them, lapping up their feet and their legs till it splashes into their mouths and they will drown inch by inch in a foot of water. D’you think that will teach the people of England what happens to rebels? Do you think that will teach the people of England not to defy me? Never to come against a Tudor?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I am trying to catch my breath as if it is me staked out on the beach with the rising tide splashing against my closed lips, wetting my face, slowly rising. “I hope so.”

Days later, when Henry is gone again on his restless patrolling of the Midlands, we hear that the boy has landed in Ireland and set siege to Waterford Castle. The Irish are flocking to his standard and Henry’s rule in Ireland is utterly overthrown.

I rest in the afternoons; this baby is sitting heavily on my belly and makes me too weary to walk. Margaret sits with me, sewing at my side, and whispers to me that Ireland has become ungovernable, the rule of the English is overthrown, everyone is declaring for the boy. Her husband, Sir Richard, will have to go to that most dangerous island; Henry has commanded him to take troops to fight the boy and his adoring allies. But before Sir Richard has even ordered the ships to transport his troops, the siege is lifted without warning, and the elusive boy is gone.

“Where is he now?” I ask Henry as he prepares to ride out, his yeomen of the guard behind him, armed and helmeted as if they are on campaign, as if he expects an attack on the highways of his own country.

His face is dark. “I don’t know,” he says shortly. “Ireland is a bog of treachery. He is hiding in the wetlands, he is hiding in the mountains. My man in Ireland, Poynings, has no command, he has lost all control, he knows nothing. The boy is like a ghost, we hear of him but we never see him. We know they are hiding him but we don’t know where.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1495

The king does not come to my bedroom at night, not even to sit and talk with me; he has not come for months. The days when we were friends and lovers seem very far away now. I do not let myself grieve for the loss of his love, I sense that he is fighting a battle in his own heart as well as constantly patrolling the roads of England. His fear and hatred consume him, he cannot even take pleasure at the thought of another child in my belly. He cannot sit beside my fire and talk quietly with me, he is too restless, hagridden by his constant fear. Out in the darkness, somewhere in England, in Ireland, or in Wales, the boy is awake, and Henry cannot sleep quietly at my side.

Sir Richard Pole has finally sailed for Ireland to try to find Irish chieftains who can be persuaded to hold to their alliance against the boy, and Maggie comes to my rooms every night after dinner and we spend the evening together. We always make sure to keep one of My Lady’s women with us, in earshot, and we always speak of nothing but banalities; but it is a comfort for me to have her by my side. If the lady-in-waiting reports to My Lady, and of course we must assume that she does, she can say that we spent the evening talking of the children, of their education, and of the weather, which is too damp and cold for us to walk with any pleasure.

Maggie is the only one of my ladies that I can talk to without fear. Only to her can I say quietly, “Baby Elizabeth is no stronger. Actually, I think she is weaker today.”

“The new herbs did no good?”

“No good.”

“Perhaps when the spring comes and you can take her into the country?”

“Maggie, I don’t even know that she will see the spring. I look at her, and I look at your little Henry, and though they are so near in age, they look like different beings. She’s like a little faerie child, she is so small and so frail, and he is such a strong stocky boy.”

She puts her hand over mine. “Ah, my dear. Sometimes God takes the most precious children to his own.”

“I named her for my mother, and I fear she will go to her.”

“Then her grandmother will look after her in heaven, if we cannot keep her here on earth. We have to believe that.”

I nod at the words of comfort, but the thought of losing Elizabeth is almost unbearable. Maggie puts her hand on mine.

“We do know that she will live in glory with her grandmother in heaven,” she repeats. “We know this, Elizabeth.”

“But I had such a picture of her as a princess,” I say wonderingly. “I could almost see her. A proud girl, with her father’s copper hair and my mother’s fair skin, and our love of reading. I could almost see her, as if standing for a portrait, with her hand on a book. I could almost see her as a young woman, proud as a queen. And I told My Lady the King’s Mother that Elizabeth would be the greatest Tudor of them all.”

“Perhaps she will be,” Maggie suggests. “Perhaps she will survive. Babies are unpredictable, perhaps she will grow stronger.”

I shake my head on my doubts, and that night, at about midnight, when I am wakened by a deep yellow autumn moon shining through the slats of the shutters, my thoughts go at once to my sick baby. I get up and put on my robe. At once Maggie, sleeping in my bed, is awake. “Are you ill?”

“No. Just troubled. I want to see Elizabeth. You go to sleep.”

“I’ll come with you,” she says, and slips out of bed and throws a shawl over her nightgown.

Together we open the door and the dozing sentry gives a jolt of surprise as if we are a pair of ghosts, white-faced with our hair plaited under our nightcaps. “It’s all right,” Maggie says. “Her Grace is going to the nursery.”

He and his fellow guard follow us as we walk in our bare feet down the cold stone corridor, and then Maggie pauses. “What is it?” she asks.

“I thought I heard something,” I say quietly. “Can you hear it? Like singing?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing. I can’t hear anything.”

I know what the sound is then, and I turn to the nursery in sudden urgency. I quicken my stride, I start to run, I push my way past the guard and race up the stone steps to the tower, where the nursery is warm and safe at the top. As I open the door the nurse starts up from where she is bending over the little crib, her face aghast, saying: “Your Grace! I was just going to send for you!”

I snatch up Elizabeth into my arms and she is warm and breathing quietly but white, fatally white, and her eyelids and her lips as blue as cornflowers. I kiss her for the last time and I see her fleeting tiny smile, for she knows I am here, and then I hold her, I don’t move at all, I just stand and hold her to my heart as I feel the little chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and then become still.

“Is she asleep?” Maggie asks hopefully.

I shake my head and I feel the tears running down my face. “No. She’s not asleep. She’s not asleep.”

In the morning, after I have washed her little body and dressed her in her nightgown, I send a short message to her father to tell him that our little daughter is dead. He comes home so quickly that I guess he had the news ahead of my letter. He has a spy set on me, as he has on everyone else in England, and that they have already told him that I ran from my bedchamber in the middle of the night to hold my daughter in my arms as she died.

He comes into my rooms in a rush and kneels before me, as I am seated, dressed in dark blue, in my chair by my fireside. His head is bowed as he reaches blindly for me. “My love,” he says quietly.

I take his hands and I can hear, but I don’t see, my ladies skitter out of the room to leave us alone. “I am so sorry I was not here,” he says. “God forgive me that I was not with you.”

“You’re never here,” I say softly. “Nothing matters to you anymore but the boy.”

“I am trying to defend the inheritance for all our children.” He raises his head but speaks without any anger. “I was trying to make her safe in her own country. Oh, dear child, poor little child. I didn’t realize she was so ill, I should have listened to you. God forgive me that I did not.”

“She wasn’t really ill,” I say. “She just never thrived. When she died it wasn’t a struggle at all, it was as if she just sighed, and then she was gone.”

He bows his head and puts his face against my hands in my lap. I can feel a hot tear on my fingers, and I bend over him and hold him tightly, I grip him as if I would feel his strength and have him feel mine.

“God bless her,” he says. “And forgive me for being away. I feel her loss more than you know, more than I can tell you. I know it seems that I’m not a good father to our children, and I’m not a good husband to you—but I care for them and for you more than you know, Elizabeth. I swear that at least I will be a good king for them. I will keep the kingdom for my children and your throne for you, and you will see your son Arthur inherit.”

“Hush,” I say. With the memory of Elizabeth, warm and limp in my arms, I don’t want to tempt fate by foretelling the future of our other children.

He gets up and I stand with him as he wraps his arms around me and holds me tightly, his face against my neck as if he would inhale comfort from the scent of my skin.

“Forgive me,” he breathes. “I can hardly ask it of you; but I do. Forgive me, Elizabeth.”

“You are a good husband, Henry,” I reassure him. “And a good father. I know that you love us in your heart, I know that you wouldn’t have gone away if you had thought we might lose her, and see, here you are—home almost before I had sent for you.”

He tips his head back to look at me, but he does not deny that it was his spies who told me that his daughter was dead. He did not hear it first from me. “I have to know everything,” is all he says. “That’s how I keep us safe.”

My Lady the King’s Mother plans and executes a great funeral for our little girl. She is buried as a princess in the chapel of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. Archbishop Morton performs the funeral service, the Bishop of Worcester, who told me that the boy was coming home, serves the Mass with quiet dignity. I cannot tell Henry that the bishop was smiling the night that the beacons were lit for the landing of the boy. I cannot report on the priest who is burying my child. I fold my hands before me and I rest my head against them and I pray for her precious soul and I know without doubt that she is in heaven; and that I am left to the bitterness of a loss on earth.

Arthur, my firstborn and always the most thoughtful of my children, puts his hand in mine, though he is now a big boy of just nine. “Don’t cry, Lady Mother,” he whispers. “You know she’s with our lady grandmother, you know she has gone to God.”

“I know,” I say, blinking.

“And you’ve still got me.”

I swallow my tears. “I still have you,” I agree.

“You’ll always have me.”

“I’m glad of that.” I smile down at him. “I am so glad of that, Arthur.”

“And perhaps the next baby will be a girl.”

I hold him close to me. “Whether she is a girl or a boy, she can’t take the place of Elizabeth. Do you think if I lost you, I wouldn’t mind because I still had Harry?”

His own eyes are bright with tears but he laughs at that. “No, though Harry would think so. Harry would think it a very good exchange.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1495

My cousin Maggie comes to my privy chamber in Westminster, carrying my box of jewels by way of excusing her arrival. In these suspicious times we always make sure that when we are together we are clearly doing something; she fetches things for me, I send her on errands. We never look as if we have met only to put our heads together, whispering secrets. By the way she carries the box, in front of her, for all to see, demonstrating that we are going to look at my jewels, I guess at once that she wants to speak to me in private.

I turn to my maid-in-waiting. “Please fetch the dark purple ribbon from the wardrobe rooms,” I say.

She curtseys. “I’m sorry, Your Grace, I thought you wanted the blue.”

“I did, but I have changed my mind. And Claire—go with her and bring the matching purple cloak.”

The two of them leave as Margaret opens the box of jewels and holds up my amethysts as if to show me. The other women are closer to the fireside, and can see us but not hear what we are saying. Margaret holds the jewels to the light to make them sparkle with a deep purple fire.

“What?” I ask tersely as I seat myself before my looking-glass.

“He’s in Scotland.”

A little bubble of laughter, or perhaps it is a sob of fear, forms in my throat. “In Scotland? He’s left Ireland? You are sure?”

“Honored guest of King James. The king acknowledges him, is holding a great meeting of the lords, calls him by his title: Richard Duke of York.” She stands behind me, lifting up the amethyst coronal to show me.

“How d’you know?”

“My husband, God bless him, told me. He got it from the Spanish ambassador, who got it from the Spain dispatches—everything that they write to Spain they send a copy to us, the alliance between the king and the Spanish has grown so strong.” She checks that the women at the fire are engaged in their own conversation, puts the amethysts around my neck, and goes on. “The Spanish ambassador to Scotland was called in by King James of Scotland, who raged at him and said that our King Henry was a cat’s-paw in the hands of the Spanish king and queen. But he—James—would see the rightful king of England take his throne.”

“Is he going to invade?”

Margaret puts the coronal on my head. I see my wondering face in the looking-glass before me, my eyes wide, my face pale. For a moment I seem like my mother, for a moment I am a beauty as she was. I pat my white cheeks. “I look like I have seen a ghost.”

“We all look like that,” Margaret says, a weak reflected smile over my head as she fastens the amethysts around my neck. “We are all going around as if a ghost is on his way to us. They are singing in the streets about the Duke of York, who dances in Ireland and plays in Scotland and will walk in an English garden and everyone will be merry again. They say he is a ghost come to dance, a duke brought back from the dead.”

“They say it is my brother,” I say flatly.

“The King of Scotland says that he will put his life on it.”

“And what does your husband say?”

“He says there will be war,” she replies, the smile fading from her face. “The Scots will invade to support Richard, they will invade England, and there will be war.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1495

Henry’s uncle Jasper comes home from one of his long hard rides as pale as the men that he has tried and sent to the gallows, with deep lines of weariness grooved into his face. He is old, much more than sixty, and he has worked this year like a man desperate to see his nephew safe on his throne, terribly aware that time is running out for them both. Old age is dogging him, disaster is walking at Henry’s heels.

My aunt Katherine, always a dutiful wife, puts him to bed in their rich and comfortable rooms, calls physicians, apothecaries, and nurses to care for him, but she is elbowed aside by My Lady the King’s Mother, who prides herself on her knowledge of medicine and herbs and says that Jasper’s constitution is so strong that all he needs is good food, rest, and some tinctures of her own creation to get well. My husband Henry visits the sickroom three times a day, in the morning to see how his uncle has slept, before dinner to make sure that he has the very best that the kitchen can offer and that it is served to him first, hot and fresh, on bended knee, and then last thing at night, before he and his mother go to the chapel and pray for the health of the man who has been the keystone of their lives for so very long. Jasper has been like a father to Henry, and his only constant companion. He has been his protector and his mentor. Henry would have died without his uncle’s constant loving care. To My Lady, I think he has been the most potent of influences a woman can know: the love she never named, the life she never led, the man she should have married.

Both Henry and his mother share a confident assumption that Jasper, who has always ridden hard and fought hard, who has always escaped danger and thrived in exile, will once again slide through the claws of death and dance at the Christmas feast. But after a few days they look more and more grave, and after a few more they are calling on the physicians to come and see him. A few days more, and Jasper insists on seeing a lawyer and making his will.

“His will?” I repeat to Henry.

“Of course,” he snaps. “He is a man of sixty-three. And devout, and responsible. Of course he is making his will.”

“He is very ill then?”

“What do you think?” He rounds on me. “Did you think that he had taken to his bed for the pleasure of a rest? He has never rested in his life; he has never been away from my side when I needed him; he has never spared himself, not for one day, not for one moment . . .” He breaks off and turns away from me so that I cannot see the tears in his eyes.

Gently, I go behind him, as he is seated in his chair, and put my arm around his back to hold him tightly; I lean down and rest my cheek against his for comfort. “I know how much you love him,” I say. “He has been like a father and more for you.”

“He has been my protector, and my teacher, my mentor and my friend,” he says brokenly. “He took me from England to safety and endured exile for my sake when I was only a boy. Then he brought me back to claim the throne. I wouldn’t even have made it to the battlefield without him. I couldn’t have found my way across England, I wouldn’t have dared to trust the Stanleys, God knows I wouldn’t have won the battle but for his teaching. I owe him everything.”

“Is there anything I can do?” I ask helplessly, for I know there will be nothing.

“My mother is doing everything,” Henry says proudly. “In your condition you can do nothing to help her. You can pray if you like.”

Ostentatiously, I take my ladies to chapel and we pray and command a sung Mass for the health of Jasper Tudor, uncle to the King of England, old irrepressible rebel that he is. Christmas comes to court but Henry commands that it be celebrated quietly; there is to be no loud music and no shouts of laughter to disturb the sickroom where Jasper lies sleeping, and the king and his mother keep their constant vigil.

Arthur is taken in to see his dying uncle, Harry goes in after him. Little Princess Margaret is spared the ordeal but My Lady insists that the boys kneel at the bedside of the greatest Englishman the world has ever known.

“Welshman,” I say quietly.

On Christmas Day we go to church and celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and pray for the health of his most beloved son and soldier Jasper Tudor. But on the day after, Henry comes to my room unannounced early in the morning and sits on the foot of my bed as I sleepily rise up, and Cecily, who is sleeping with me, jumps up, curtseys, and scuttles out of the room.

“He’s gone,” Henry says. He does not sound grieved so much as amazed. “My Lady Mother and I were sitting with him and he stretched out his hand to her and he smiled at me, and then he lay back on his pillows and breathed out a long sigh—and then he was gone.”

There is a silence. The depth of his loss is so great that I know I can say nothing to comfort him. Henry has lost the only father he ever knew; he is as bereft as an orphan child. Clumsily, I get to my knees, my big belly making me awkward, and I stretch my arms out towards him to hold him. He has his back to me and he does not turn, he does not realize I am reaching out to him in pity. He is all alone.

For a moment I think he is absorbed in grief, but then I realize that the loss of Jasper only adds to his perennial fears.

“So who is going to lead my army against the boy and the Scots?” Henry asks, speaking to himself, cold with fear. “I am going to have to face the boy in battle, in the North of England, where they hate me. Who is going to command if Jasper has left me? Who will be at my side, who can I trust, now that my uncle is dead?”

PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, WINTER 1496

Maggie comes into my room with so rapid a step and with so fierce a glance towards me that I can tell, knowing her as I do, that she is desperate to speak with me. I am sitting with My Lady the King’s Mother, with sewing in my hands, listening to one of her women reading one of her eternal homilies on religion, reading aloud from a hand-copied manuscript, for God knows no one would bother to print such a dirge, and Maggie curtseys to us both and sinks to a stool and takes up some sewing and tries to look composed.

I wait till the end of a chapter and for the girl to turn the manuscript page, and I say, “I will walk in the garden.”

My Lady looks out of the window where a gray full-bellied sky promises snow and says, “You had much better wait until the sun comes out.”

“I’ll wear my cloak, and my muff and my hat,” I say, and my ladies, after a little hesitating glance at My Lady the King’s Mother in case she is going to overrule me, fetch my things and wrap me as if I were a bulky parcel.

My Lady lets them do their work, as she has no appetite for countermanding me in my own rooms anymore. Since the death of Jasper she has aged a dozen years. I look at her now and sometimes I no longer see the powerful woman who dominated me and my husband, but instead a woman who spent all her life on a cause, sacrificed the love of her life for her son, and now waits to hear if the cause is lost and her son is on the run again.

“Margaret, will you give me your arm?” I ask.

Maggie rises with careful lack of interest, as if she had planned to stay indoors, and puts on her own cloak.

“You must have a guard,” My Lady rules. “And you three—” she points to the nearest women, barely looking to see who they are “—you three shall walk with Her Grace.”

They do not look very pleased at the thought of a cold walk with snow coming, but they rise and fetch their capes from their rooms and with a guard before and behind us, and ladies around us, finally Maggie and I are alone together and we can talk without being overhead.

“What?” I say tersely as soon as the guards are ahead and the women lagging behind. Maggie takes my arm to save me from slipping on the frosty ground. Beside us the gray, cold river is rimmed with white on the banks, while a seagull, no whiter than the frost, calls once overhead and then wheels away.

“He’s married,” she says shortly.

She never needs to say his name. Indeed, we maintain the convention that we have no name for him.

“Married!” At once I have a clutch of fear that he has married beneath himself, some sympathetic serving girl, some opportunistic widow who has loaned him money. If he has married badly, then Henry will crow with joy and scorn him, calling him Peterkin and Perkin all the more, the son of a drunkard and a drudge, now wedded to a slut. Everyone will say that it proves he is no prince, but a lowly pretender. Or they will say that he has learned common ways, vulgar ways, to be dazzled by the widow of some minor grandee and marry her for her dower money. If his bride is unchaste, some slattern in a hovel, he might as well give up and go home.

I stop still. “Oh, dear God, Maggie. Who is she?”

She is beaming. “A good marriage, even a great marriage. He has married Katherine Huntly, kinswoman to the King of Scotland himself, daughter of the Earl of Huntly, the greatest lord of Scotland.”

“The Earl of Huntly’s daughter?”

“And they say she is a beauty. She was given in marriage by King James himself. They were betrothed before Christmas, they are married now, and they are already saying that she is with child.”

“My little bro . . . Ri . . . he is married? The boy is married?”

“And his wife with child.”

I take her arm and we walk on. “Oh, if only my mother could have seen this.”

Maggie nods. “She would be so glad. So glad.”

I laugh aloud. “She would be delighted, especially if the girl is beautiful and has a fortune. But Maggie, do you know where they married? And how they looked?”

“She wore a gown of deepest red, and your bro . . . he wore a white shirt and black hose and a black velvet jacket. They held a great tournament to celebrate.”

“A tournament!”

“King James paid for everything, it was all done very well. They are saying it was as grand as our court, some say better. And now the king and the new couple have gone to his hunting palace at Falkland in Fife.”

“My husband knows all this.” I state the obvious.

“Yes. I know it from Sir Richard, who has to go to Lincoln to muster an army for war with Scotland. He had it from one of the king’s spies. The king is in his council right now, commanding the repair of the castles in the North of England and preparing for an invasion from Scotland.”

“An invasion led by the King of Scotland?”

“They say it is a certainty this spring, now that he is married into the royal family of Scotland. The King of Scotland is certain to put him on the throne of England.”

I think of my brother as I last saw him, a handsome little boy of ten with fair hair and bright hazel eyes and an impish smile. I think of the tremble of his lower lip when we kissed him good-bye and wrapped him up warmly and sent him out of sanctuary, all on his own, into the boat to go downriver, praying that the plan would work and that he would get overseas to our aunt Margaret the duchess and that she would save him. I think of him now, fully grown, a man on his wedding day dressed in black and white. I imagine him smiling his impish smile, and his bride beautiful at his side.

I put my hand to my belly, where I am growing a little Tudor, my brother’s enemy, the son of the man who usurped my brother’s throne.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Maggie says, seeing the smile die away from my face. “There is nothing either of us can do but hope to survive and pray that nobody puts the blame on us. And see what happens.”

In February I prepare for my confinement, leaving a court still subdued by mourning for Jasper, and still uneasy at the news from the youthful joyful court in Scotland where we hear that they spend their time hunting in the snow, and planning to invade our northern lands as soon as the weather is better.

Henry holds a grand dinner before I go into the darkened room, and the Spanish ambassador, Roderigo Gonzalva de Puebla, attends as an honored guest. He is a small man, dark and good-looking, and he bows low towards me and kisses my hand and then rises up to beam at me as if he is confident that I shall find him very handsome.

“The ambassador is proposing a marriage for Prince Arthur,” Henry tells me quietly. “The youngest Spanish princess, the Infanta Katherine of Aragon.”

I look from Henry’s smiling face to the smug ambassador and understand that I am to be pleased. “What a good idea,” I say. “But they are still so young!”

“A betrothal, to indicate the friendship between our countries,” Henry says smoothly. He nods to the ambassadors and leads me to the top table out of earshot. “It’s not just to link Spain to our interests, a constant ally against France, it’s to get the boy. They have promised me if Arthur is betrothed, that they’ll tempt the boy to visit them with the promise of an alliance. They’ll get him to Granada and hand him over to us.”

“He won’t go,” I say certainly. “Why would he leave his wife in Scotland and go to Spain?”

“Because he wants the support of Spain for his invasion,” Henry says shortly. “But they will stand as our ally. They will give us their infanta in marriage, and they will capture our traitor to make sure that she marries the only heir to the throne. Their interests become our interests. And they are newly come to their thrones themselves. They know what it is like to fight for their kingdom. When they betroth their princess to our prince they sign a death warrant for the boy. They will want him dead just as we do.”

The court rise to their feet and acknowledge us, bowing low to me, and the server of the ewery comes to me with the golden bowl filled with warm water. I dip my fingers in the scented water and wipe them on the napkin. “But, husband—”

“Never mind,” Henry says shortly. “When you have had our new baby and come back to court we will talk of these things. Now you must receive the good wishes of the court, go to your confinement, and think about nothing but a good birth. I am hoping for another boy from you, Elizabeth.”

I smile, as if I am reassured, and I glance down the court where the ambassador de Puebla is seated, above the saltcellar, an honored guest, and I wonder if he could be a man so two-faced, so inveterate in his own ambition, that he would promise friendship to a boy of twenty-two and betray him to his death. He feels my gaze upon him and looks up to smile at me, and I think, Yes, yes, he is.

PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, MARCH 1496

I enter my confinement with a heavy heart, still missing my little girl Elizabeth, and this labor is long and hard. My sister Anne laughs and says she will study how it is done as she is with child, but what she sees makes her fearful. They give me strong birthing ale after some hours, and I wish I had my mother with me to fix me with her cool gray gaze, and to whisper to me of the river and rest, and help me through the pain. At about midnight I can feel the urgency of the baby and I squat like a peasant woman and bear down and then I hear the little faint cry and I cry too, for joy that I have had another child, for sheer exhaustion, and I find I am sobbing as if heartbroken, missing the brother that I fear I will never see, and his wife that I will never meet, and their baby, a cousin to this child, who will never play with her.

Even with the new baby girl in my arms, even wrapped up in my great bed with my ladies praising my courage and bringing me warmed ale and sweetmeats, I feel haunted by loneliness.

Maggie is the only one who sees my tears and she wipes them from my face with a scrap of linen. “What’s wrong?”

“I feel like the last of my line, I feel as if I am utterly alone.”

She does not rush to comfort me, nor even disagree with me and point to my sisters, exclaiming over the baby as she is swaddled and bound and put to the wet nurse’s breast. She looks grim, tired as I am from staying up all the night, her cheeks wet with tears like mine. She does not disagree with me. She makes the pillows comfortable behind me and then she speaks.

“We are the last,” she says quietly. “I cannot give you false words of comfort. We are the last of the Yorks. You, your sisters, me and my brother, and perhaps England will never see the white rose again.”

“Have you heard anything from Teddy?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I write, but he doesn’t reply. I am not allowed to visit. He is lost to me.”

We call the new baby Mary, in honor of Our Lady, and she is a dainty pretty little girl, with eyes of the darkest blue and hair of jet black. She feeds well and she grows strong and though I don’t forget her pale, golden-headed sister, I find I am comforted by this new baby in the cradle, this new Tudor for England.

I emerge from confinement to find the country mustering for war. Henry comes to the nursery to see the new baby, but he does no more than glance at her in my arms. He does not even hold her. “There’s no doubt that the King of Scotland will invade, and at the head of his army will be the boy,” Henry says bitterly. “I have to recruit troops in the North and half of them are saying that though they’ll fight against the Scots, they will lay down their arms if they see the white rose. They will defend against the Scots, but they will join a son of York. This is a kingdom of traitors.”

I am holding Mary in my arms, and I feel as if I am offering her as a sop to his temper. There may be a son of York in Scotland, arming and readying his men, but here at our favorite palace of Sheen I have given Henry a Tudor princess, and he will not even look at her.

“Is there nothing we can do to persuade King James not to ally himself with . . . with the boy?”

Henry shoots me a secretive glance. “I have offered him an alliance,” he confesses. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it. I doubt that it will stick. We’ll probably never have to send her.”

“Send who?”

He looks furtive. “Margaret. Our daughter Margaret.”

I look at him as if he is mad. “Our daughter is six years old.” I state the obvious. “Do you think to marry her to the King of Scotland, who is—what?—more than twenty?”

“I think to offer her,” he says. “When she is of marriageable age he will only be in his thirties, it’s not a bad match.”

“But my lord—this is to chose all our children’s marriages with your eyes only on the one boy. You have already promised Arthur to Spain in return for them kidnapping him?”

“He won’t go. He’s too cunning.”

“And so, you would give up our little daughter to your enemy to buy the boy?”

“You would rather he was roaming free?” he snaps.

“No, of course not! But . . .”

Already, I have said too much and alerted Henry’s fears.

“I shall propose her as a wife for the King of Scotland, and in return he will give me the boy in chains,” Henry says flatly. “And whether you are thinking of sparing our little girl or of the boy when you say you don’t want such a marriage, it makes no difference. She is a Tudor princess, she must be married where she can serve our interests. She has to do her duty, as I have to do mine—every day. As every one of us has to do.”

I tighten my grip on our new baby. “And this child too? You’ve hardly looked at her. Is every one of our children only of value as a card for you to play? In this one game? In this single unstoppable disproportionate war against a boy?”

He is not even angry; his face is bitter as if his duty is hard for him, harder than anything he would propose for anyone else. “Of course,” he says flatly. “And if Margaret is the price for the death of the boy, then it is a good bargain for me.”

This summer, two new lines are graven on Henry’s face, which run from nose to mouth and mark how his lips are habitually downturned. An habitual scowl grooves his face as one report after another comes to him of the Scottish preparation for war and the weakness of the defenses of northern England. Half of the northern gentry have already crossed over the border of Scotland to be with the boy, and the families they have left behind are not stirring themselves to fight for Henry against their kinsmen.

Every evening after dinner Henry goes to his mother’s rooms and the two of them count, again and again, the names of those that they can trust in the North of England. My Lady has drawn up a list of those that they can be sure of and those that they doubt. I see both lists when I enter the rooms to bid her good night. The scroll of those they trust and that they judge to be able is weighted with an ink pot, a quill beside it, as if they are hoping to write more names, to add loyalists. The scroll of those they mistrust lolls over the table and unrolls itself towards the floor. Name after name is written with a query beside it. Nothing could exhibit more vividly that the king and his mother are afraid of their own countrymen and -women, that the king and his mother are counting their friends and finding the list too short, that the king and his mother are counting their enemies and seeing the numbers grow every day.

“What do you want?” Henry snaps at me.

I raise my eyebrows at his rudeness in front of his mother, but I curtsey to her, saying very low: “I come to bid you good night, Lady Mother.”

“Good night,” she says. She barely looks up, she is as distracted as her son.

“A woman stopped me on the way to chapel today, and she asked me if her debt to the king could be excused, or if she could be given longer to pay,” I say. “It seems that her husband was charged with a minor offense but he was given no choice of punishment. He has to pay a fine, a very heavy fine. She says they will lose their house and their land and be ruined. She says that he would have preferred to serve time in prison than see everything he has worked for broken up. His name is George Whitehouse.”

They both look at me as if I am speaking Greek. Both of them are utterly uncomprehending. “He is a loyal subject,” I say. “He just got into a brawl. It is hard that he should lose his family home for an alehouse brawl, because the fine is greater than he can pay. The fines were never so heavy before.”

“Do you understand nothing?” My Lady demands, and her tone is quietly furious. “Do you not see that we have to get every penny, every groat that we can, from everyone in the kingdom, so that we can raise armies and pay for them? Do you think we would excuse some alehouse drunkard his fine when it will buy us a soldier? Even if it buys us an arrow?”

Henry is poring over his list, not even looking up, but I am certain that he is listening. “But this man is a loyal subject,” I protest. “If he loses his house and his family, if he is ruined because the king’s men sell it over his head to collect an impossible fine, then we lose his love and his loyalty. Then we have lost a soldier. The safety of the throne is built on those that love us—only on those that love us. We rule by the consent of the governed—we have to make sure that those who are loyal to us continue as loyal. That list . . .” I point to the names of those whose loyalty is in doubt. “That list will grow if you fine good men into bankruptcy.”

“It’s all very well for you to say such a thing—you who are loved, who have always been loved!” My Lady the King’s Mother suddenly bursts out. “You who come from a family who prided themselves on being so unendingly, so showily . . .” I am horrified, waiting for what she is going to say “. . . so unceasingly endearing!” she spits as if it were the gravest fault. “Endearing! D’you know what they say about the boy?”

I shake my head.

“They say that everywhere he goes he makes friends!” She is shouting, her voice raised, her face flushed, her anger quite out of control at the mere mention of the boy and his York charm. “They say that the emperor himself, the King of France, the King of Scotland simply fell in love with him. And so we see his alliances: with the emperor, with the King of France, with the King of Scotland, easy alliances that cost him nothing. Nothing! Though we have to pledge peace, or the marriage of our children, or a fortune in gold to earn their friendship! And now we hear that the Irish are mustering for him again. Though they get nothing for it. Not money—for we pay them a fortune to stay loyal—but him they serve for love. They run to his standard because they love him!”

I look past her at my husband, who keeps his head turned away. “You could be beloved,” I say to him.

For the first time he looks up, and meets my eyes. “Not like the boy,” he says bitterly. “Apparently I don’t have the knack of it. No one is beloved like the boy.”

The woman who stopped me on my way to chapel and begged me to tell my husband the king that his subjects could not pay their fines, could not pay their taxes, is one of very many. Again and again people ask me to intercede for them to get a debt forgiven, and again and again I have to tell them that I cannot. Everyone has to pay their fines, everyone has to pay their taxes, and the tax collectors now go armed and ride with a guard. When we go on progress, this summer to the west, and ride over the green hills of Salisbury Plain, we take Henry’s privy purse officers with us, and everywhere we go they make a new valuation of the properties, lands, and businesses, and present a new bill for taxes.

Now I am sorry that I told Henry how my father used to look over the heads of the people reading the loyal address and calculate how much they could pay. My father’s system of loans and fines and borrowings has become Henry’s hated tax system and everywhere we go, we are followed by clerks who count the glass windows in the houses, or the flocks of sheep in the meadows, or the crops in the fields, and present the people who come to see us with a demand for payment.

Instead of being greeted by people cheering in the streets, crowding to wave at the royal children and blow kisses to me, the people are out of sight, bundling their goods into warehouses, smuggling away their account books, denying their prosperity. Our hosts serve the meanest of feasts and hide away their best tapestries and silverware. Nobody dares show the king hospitality and generosity, for either he or his mother will claim it as evidence that they are richer than they pretend, and accuse them of failing to declare their wealth. We go from one great house and abbey to another like grasping tinkers who visit only to steal, and I dread the apprehensive faces that greet us and their looks of relief when we leave.

And everywhere we go, at every stop, there are hooded men, following us like the figure of Death itself, on foundering horses, who speak to my husband in secret and sleep the night and then ride out the next day on the best mounts in the stables. They head west, where the Cornishmen, landowners, miners, sailors, and fishermen are declaring that they will not pay another penny of the Tudor tax, or they ride east, where the coast lies dangerously open to an invasion, or they go north to Scotland, where we hear that the king is building an army and casting guns the like of which have never been seen before, for his beloved cousin: the boy who would be King of England.

“At last I have him.” Henry walks into my room, ignoring my ladies, who leap to their feet and drop into low curtseys, ignoring the musicians, who trail into silence and wait for an order. “I have him. Look at that.”

Obediently I look at the page he shows me. It is a mass of symbols and numbers, saying nothing that I can understand.

“I can’t read this,” I tell him quietly. “This is the language you use: spies’ language.”

He tuts with impatience and draws another sheet of paper from under the first. It is a translation of the code from the Portuguese herald, sealed by the King of France himself to prove that it is true. The so-called Duke of York is the son of a barber in Tournai and I have found his parents and can send them to you . . .

“What do you think of that?” Henry demands of me. “I can prove that the boy is an imposter. I can bring his mother and father to England and they can declare him the son of a barber in Tournai. What do you think?”

I sense Margaret, my cousin, taking a few steps closer to me, as if she would defend me from the rising volume of Henry’s voice. The more uncertain he is, the more he blusters. I rise to my feet and I take his hand in my own.

“I think that it proves your case completely,” I say, just as I would soothe my son Harry, if he were arguing with his brother, near to tears with frustration. “I am sure that this will make your case completely.”

“It does!” he asserts furiously. “It is as I said—he is a poor boy from nowhere.”

“It is just as you said,” I repeat. I look up at his flushed angry face and I feel nothing but pity for him. “This proves that you are completely right.”

A little shudder goes through him. “I shall send for them, then,” he says. “These lowborn parents. I shall bring them to England and everyone can see the lowly parentage of this false boy.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1496

But Henry does not send for the Tournai barber and his wife. He sends yet another spy to Tournai, who cannot find them. I have a brief amusing picture in my mind of Tournai filled with men wrapped in their cloaks with their hoods pulled forwards to hide their faces, looking for someone—anyone—who will say that they had a boy who disappeared from home and who took it upon himself to pretend to be King of England, and who is now married into the royal family of Scotland and personal friend and well beloved of most of the rulers of Christendom.

It is such a ludicrous proposal that when Henry goes on looking for a bereft mother, for a missing boy, for anything—a name if nothing else—that I see it as the measure not of his determination to unravel a mystery, but of his increasing desperation to create an identity for the boy and pin a name on him. When I suggest that really anyone would do, it does not have to be a Tournai barber—he might as well seek anyone who is prepared to say that the boy was born and raised by them, and then went missing—Henry scowls at me and says: “Exactly, exactly. I could have half a dozen parents and still no one would believe that I have found the right ones.”

One evening in autumn I am invited into the queen’s rooms—they are still called the queen’s rooms—by My Lady the King’s Mother, who tells me that she needs to talk with me before dinner. I go with Cecily my sister, as Anne is in her confinement, expecting her first child; but when the great double doors are thrown open I see that My Lady’s presence chamber is empty, and I leave Cecily to wait for me there, beside the economical fire of small off-cut timbers, and I go into My Lady’s privy chamber alone.

She is kneeling before a prie-dieu; but when I come in, she glances over her shoulder, whispers “Amen,” and then rises to her feet. We both curtsey, she to me as I am queen, I to her as she is my mother-in-law; we press cool cheeks against each other as if we were exchanging a kiss, but our lips never touch the other’s face.

She gestures towards a chair that is the same height as hers, on the other side of the fireplace, and we sit simultaneously, neither one of us taking precedence. I am beginning to wonder what all this is about.

“I wish to speak to you in confidence,” she begins. “In absolute confidence. What you tell me will not go beyond the walls of this room. You can trust me with anything. I give you my sacred word of honor.”

I wait. I very much doubt that I am going to tell her anything, so she need not assure me that she will not repeat it. Besides, anything that might be of use to her son, she would repeat to him in the next moment. Her sacred word of honor would not even cause a second’s delay. Her sacred word of honor is worth nothing against her devotion to her son.

“I want to speak of long-ago days,” she says. “You were just a little girl and none of it was your fault. No blame is attached to you by me or anyone. Not by my son. Your mother commanded everything, and you were obedient to her then.” She pauses. “You do not have to be obedient to her now.”

I bow my head.

My Lady seems to have trouble in starting her question. She pauses, she taps her fingers on the carved arm of her chair. She closes her eyes as if in brief prayer. “When you were a young woman in sanctuary, your brother the king was in the Tower, but your little brother Richard was still with you in hiding. Your mother had kept him by her side. When they promised her that your brother Edward was to be crowned they demanded that she send Prince Richard into the Tower, to join his brother, to keep him company. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” I say. Despite myself I glance towards the heaped logs in the fireplace as if I could see in the glowing embers the arched roof of the sanctuary, my mother’s white desperate face, the dark blue of her mourning gown, and the little boy that we bought from his parents, took hold of, washed, commanded to say nothing, and dressed up as my little brother, hat pulled low on his head, a muffler across his mouth. We handed him over to the archbishop, who swore he would be safe, though we did not trust him, we did not trust any of them. We sent that little boy into danger, to save Richard. We thought it would buy us a night, perhaps a night and a day. We could not believe our luck when no one challenged him, when the two boys together, my brother Edward and the pauper child, kept up the deception.

“The lords of the privy council came and demanded that you hand your little brother over to them,” My Lady says, her voice a lilting murmur. “But now, I wonder if you did?”

I look at her, meeting her gaze with an honest frank stare. “Of course we did,” I say bluntly. “Everyone knows that we did. The whole privy council witnessed it. Your own husband Thomas, Lord Stanley, was there. Everyone knows that they took my little brother Richard to live with my brother the king, in the Tower, to keep him company before his coronation. You were at court yourself, you must have seen them take him to the Tower. You must remember, everybody knew, that my mother wept as she said good-bye to him, but the archbishop himself swore that Richard would be safe.”

She nods. “Ah, but then . . . then, did your mother lay a little plot to get them out?” My lady draws closer, her hand reaching out like a claw clasping my hands in my lap. “She was a clever woman, and always alert to danger. I wonder if she was ready for them to come for Prince Richard? Remember, I joined my men with hers in an attack on the Tower to rescue them. I tried to save them too. But after that, after it failed, did she save them—or perhaps just save Richard? Her youngest boy? Did she have a plot that she did not tell me about? I was punished for helping her, I was imprisoned in my husband’s house and forbidden from speaking or writing to anyone. Did your mother, loyal and clever woman that she was, did she get Richard out? Did she get your brother Richard out of the Tower?”

“You know that she was plotting all the time,” I say. “She was writing to you, she was writing to your son. You would know more than I do about that time. Did she tell you she had him safe? Have you kept that secret, all this long time?”

She whips back her hand as if I were as hot as the embers in the hearth. “What d’you mean? No! She never told me such a thing!”

“You were plotting with her to free us, weren’t you?” I ask, as sweet as sugared milk. “You were plotting with her to bring in your son to save us? That was why Henry came to England? To free us all? Not to take the throne, but to restore it to my brother and to free us?”

“But she didn’t tell me anything,” Lady Margaret bursts out. “She never told me anything. And though everyone said that the boys were dead, she never held a Requiem Mass for them, and we never found their bodies, we never found their murderers nor any trace or whisper of a plot to kill them. She never named their killers and no one ever confessed.”

“You hoped that people would think it was their uncle Richard,” I observed quietly. “But you didn’t have the courage to accuse him. Not even when he was dead in an unmarked grave. Not even when you publicly listed his crimes. You never accused him of that. Not even Henry, not even you had the gall to say that he murdered his nephews.”

“Were they murdered?” she hisses at me. “If it was not Richard? It doesn’t matter who did it! Were they murdered? Were they both killed? Do you know that?”

I shake my head.

“Where are the boys?” she whispers, her voice barely louder than the flicker of flame in the hearth. “Where are they? Where is Prince Richard now?”

“I think you know better than me. I think you know exactly where he is.” I turn back to her, and I let her see my smile. “Don’t you think it is him, in Scotland? Don’t you think he is free, and leading an army against us? Against your own son—calling him a usurper?”

The anguish in her face is genuine. “They’ve crossed the border,” she whispers. “They’ve mustered a massive force, the King of Scotland rides with the boy at the head of thousands of men, he’s cast cannon, bombards, he’s organized them—no one has seen such an army in the North before. And the boy has sent a proclamation . . .” She breaks off, and from inside her gown she draws it out. I cannot deny my curiosity; I put out my hand and she passes it over. It is a proclamation by the boy, he must have had hundreds made, but at the bottom is his signature, RR—Ricardus Rex, King Richard IV of England.

I cannot take my eyes from the confident swirl of the initial. I put my finger on the dry ink; perhaps this is my brother’s signature. I cannot believe that my fingertip will not sense his touch, that the ink will not grow warm under my hand. He signed this, and now my finger is on it. “Richard,” I say wonderingly, and I can hear the love in my voice. “Richard.”

“He calls upon the people of England to capture Henry as he flees,” Henry’s mother says, her voice quavering. I hardly hear her, I am thinking of my little brother, signing hundreds of proclamations Ricardus Rex: Richard the King. I find I am smiling, thinking of the little boy that my mother loved so much, that we all loved for his sunny good nature. I think of him signing this flourish and smiling his smile, certain that he will win England back for the House of York.

“He has crossed the Scottish border, he is marching on Berwick,” she moans.

At last I realize what she is saying. “They have invaded?”

She nods.

“The king is going to go? He has his troops ready?”

“We’ve sent money,” she says. “A fortune. He is pouring money and arms into the North.”

“He is riding out? Henry will lead his army against the boy?”

She shakes her head. “We won’t put an army in the field. Not yet, not in the North.”

I am bewildered. I look from the bold proclamation in black ink to her old, frightened face. “Why not? He must defend the North. I thought you were ready for this?”

“We can’t!” she bursts out. “We dare not march an army north to face the boy. What if the troops turn on us as soon as we get there? If they change sides, if the men declare for Richard, then we will have done nothing but give him an army and all our weapons. We dare not take a mustered army anywhere near him. England has to be defended by the men of the North, fighting under their own leaders, defending their own lands against the Scots, and we will hire mercenaries to bolster their ranks—men from Lorraine and from Germany.”

I look at her incredulously. “You are hiring foreign soldiers because you can’t trust Englishmen?”

She wrings her hands. “People are so bitter about the taxation and the fines, they speak against the king. People are so untrustworthy, and we can’t be sure . . .”

“You can’t trust an English army not to change sides and fight against the king?”

She hides her face in her hands; she sinks into her chair, almost sinking to her knees as if in prayer. I look at her blankly, unable to conjure an expression of sympathy. I have never in my life heard of such a thing as this: a country invaded and the king afraid to march out to defend his borders, a king who cannot trust the army he has mustered, equipped, and paid. A king who looks like a usurper and calls on foreign troops even as a boy, an unblooded boy, demands his throne.

“Who will lead this northern army if the king won’t go?” I ask.

This alone gives her some joy. “Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey,” she says. “We are trusting him with this. Your sister is bearing his child in our keeping, I am certain he won’t betray us. And we have her and his first child as a hostage. The Courtenays will stand by us, and we will marry your sister Catherine to William Courtenay, to make them hold firm. And to have a man who was known to be loyal to the House of York riding against the boy will look good, don’t you think? It must make people stop and think, won’t it? They must see that we kept Thomas Howard in the Tower and he came out safely.”

“Unlike the boy,” I remark.

Her eyes snap towards me and I see terror in her face. “Which boy?” she asks. “Which boy?”

“My cousin, Edward,” I say smoothly. “You still hold him for no reason, without charge, unjustly. He should be released now, so that people cannot say that you take boys of York and hold them in the Tower.”

“We don’t.” She answers by rote as if it is the murmured response to a prayer that she has learned by heart. “He is there for his own safety.”

“I ask for his release,” I say. “The country thinks he should be freed. I, as queen, request it. At this moment, where we should show that we are confident.”

She shakes her head and sits back in her chair, firm in her determination. “Not until it is safe for him to come out.”

I rise to my feet, the proclamation still in my hand that calls for the people to rise against Henry, refuse his taxation, capture him as he flees back to Brittany where he came from. “I can’t comfort you,” I say coldly. “You have encouraged your son to tax people to the point of their ruin, you have allowed him to hide himself away and not go out and show himself and make friends, you have encouraged him to pursue and persecute this boy who now invades us, and you have urged him to recruit an army that he cannot trust, and now to bring in foreign soldiers. Last time he brought in foreign soldiers they brought the sweat, which nearly killed us all. The King of England should be beloved by his people, not an enemy to their peace. He should not be afraid of his own army.”

“But is the boy your brother?” she demands hoarsely. “That’s what I called you here to answer. You know. You must know what your mother did to save him. Is your mother’s favorite boy coming against mine?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, suddenly seeing my way clear and away from this haunting question. I have a sudden lift of my spirits as I understand, at last, what I should answer. “It doesn’t matter who Henry is facing. Whether it is my mother’s favorite boy or another mother’s son. What matters is that you have not made your boy the beloved of England. You should have made him beloved and you have not done so. His only safety lies in the love of his people, and you have not secured that for him.”

“How could I?” she demands. “How could such a thing ever be done? These are faithless people, these are a heartless people, they run after will-o’-the-wisps, they don’t value true worth.”

I look at her and I almost pity her, as she sits twisted in her chair, her glorious prie-dieu with its huge Bible and the richly enameled cover behind her, the best rooms in the palace draped with the finest tapestries and a fortune in her strongbox. “You could not make a beloved king, for your boy was not a beloved child,” I say, and it is as if I am condemning her. I feel as hard-hearted, as hard-faced, as the recording angel at the end of days. “You have tried for him, but you have failed him. He was never loved as a child, and he has grown into a man who cannot inspire love nor give love. You have spoiled him utterly.”

“I loved him!” She leaps up suddenly furious, her dark eyes blazing with rage. “Nobody can deny that I loved him! I have given my life for him! I only ever thought of him! I nearly died giving birth to him and I have sacrificed everything—love, safety, a husband of my choice—just for him.”

“He was raised by another woman, Lady Herbert, the wife of his guardian, and he loved her,” I say relentlessly. “You called her your enemy, and you took him from her and put him in the care of his uncle. When you were defeated by my father, Jasper took him away from everything he knew, into exile, and you let them go without you. You sent him away, and he knew that. It was for your ambition; he knows that. He knows no lullabies, he knows no bedtime stories, he knows no little games that a mother plays with her sons. He has no trust, he has no tenderness. You worked for him, yes, and you plotted for him and you strove for him—but I doubt that you ever, in all his baby years, held him on your knees and tickled his toes, and made him giggle.”

She shrinks back from me as if I am cursing her. “I am his mother, not his wet nurse. Why would I caress him? I taught him to be a leader, not a baby.”

“You are his commander,” I say. “His ally. But there is no true love in it—none at all. And now you see the price you pay for that. There is no true love in him, neither to give nor receive—none at all.”

Horrifying stories come from the North, of the Scots army coming in like an army of wolves, destroying everything they find. The defenders of the North of England march bravely against them, but before they can join battle, the Scots have melted away, back to their own high hills. It is not a defeat, it is something far worse than that: it is a disappearance. It is a warning which only tells us that they will come again. So Henry is not reassured, and demands money from Parliament—hundreds of thousands of pounds—and raises more in reluctant loans from all his lords and from the merchants of London to pay for men to be armed and stand ready against this invisible threat. Nobody knows what the Scots are planning, if they will raid constantly, destroying our pride and our confidence in the North of England, coming out of the blizzards at the worst time of year; or if they will wait for spring and launch a full invasion.

“He has a child,” Maggie whispers to me. The court is busy with preparations for Christmas. Maggie and her husband have been at Ludlow Castle with my son Arthur, introducing him to his principality of Wales, but they have come home to Westminster Palace in time to celebrate the Christmas feast. On the way Maggie listens to the gossip in the inns and great houses and abbeys where they stop for hospitality. “They all say that he has a child.”

At once I think how glad my mother would be, how she would have wanted to see her grandchild. “Girl or boy?” I ask eagerly.

“A boy. He’s had a boy. The House of York has a new heir.”

Foolishly, wrongly, I clasp her hands and know that my bright joy is mirrored in her smile. “A boy?”

“A new white rose, a white rosebud. A new son of York.”

“Where is he? In Edinburgh?”

“They say that he’s living with his wife in Falkland, at a royal hunting lodge. They live quietly together with their baby. They say she is very, very beautiful and that he is happy to stay with her, they are so much in love.”

“He won’t invade?”

She shrugs. “It’s not the season, but perhaps he wants to live quietly. Newly married, with a beautiful wife and a baby in her arms? Perhaps he thinks this is the best that he can get.”

“If I could write to him . . . if I could just tell him . . . oh, if I could tell him that this is the best.”

Slowly, she shakes her head. “Nothing goes across the border but the king knows of it,” she says. “If you sent so much as one word to the boy, the king would see it as the greatest betrayal in the world. He would never forgive you, he would doubt you forever, and he would think you have been his hidden enemy all along.”

“If only someone could tell the boy to stay where he is, to find joy and keep it, that the throne won’t bring him the happiness he has now.”

“I can’t tell him,” Maggie says. “I’ve found that truth for myself: a good husband and a place that I can call my home at Ludlow Castle.”

“Have you really?”

Smilingly, she nods. “He’s a good man, and I am glad to be married to him. He’s calm and he’s quiet and he is loyal to the king and faithful to me. I’ve seen enough excitement and disloyalty; I can think of nothing better to do in my life than to raise my own son and to help yours to become a prince, to run Ludlow Castle as you would wish, and to welcome your son’s bride into our home, when she comes.”

“And Arthur?” I ask her.

She smiles at me. “He is a prince to be proud of,” she says. “He is generous, and fair. When Sir Richard takes him to watch the judges at their work his desire is to be merciful. He rides well and when he goes out he greets people as his friend. He is everything that you would want him to be. And Richard is teaching him all that he knows. He’s a good guardian for your boy. Arthur will make a good king, perhaps even a great king.”

“If the boy does not claim his throne.”

“Perhaps the boy will think that loving a woman and loving his child is enough,” Maggie says. “Perhaps he will understand that a prince does not have to become a king. Perhaps he will think that it is more important to be a man, a loving man. Perhaps when he sees his wife with the child in her arms he will know that this is the greatest kingdom a man can wish for.”

“If I could tell him that!”

“I can’t get a letter to my own brother, just down the river in the Tower of London. How could we ever get a letter to yours?”

THE TOWER OF LONDON, SUMMER 1497

The Cornishmen start by grumbling that the king is taxing them too hard, and then that he has stolen their rights to the tin that they mine. They are a hardworking, bitter set of men who face danger daily, in the tiny cramped conditions underground, speaking their own strange language, living more like barbarians than Christian men. Far away from London, in the utmost west of the country, they are easily persuaded by dreams or rumors. They believe in kings and angels, in appearances and miracles. My father always said that they were Englishmen like no others, Cornishmen, not of English stock at all, and that they had to be ruled with kindness, as if they were the mischievous elves that live alongside them.

In days, in moments, they are agreed and furious; they go through the west like a summer fire, blazing up, jumping a field or two, raging on faster than a galloping horse. Soon they have the whole of Cornwall up in arms, and then the other western counties join with them, equally angry. They form separate armies led by men from Somerset, Wiltshire, and Cornwall under the command of a Cornish blacksmith, Michael Joseph, An Gof, a man said to be ten feet high who has sworn that he will not be ruined by a king whose father was no king, who is trying new ways, Tudor ways, Welsh ways against good Cornishmen.

But it is not just a rebellion of ignorant men: yeomen turn out for them, fishermen, farmers, miners, and then, worst of all, a nobleman, Lord Audley, offers to lead them.

“I’ll leave you and my mother and the children here,” Henry says tersely to me, his horse waiting at the head of his yeomen of the guard, who are arrayed in battle order outside the White Tower, the gates closed, the cannons rolled up to the walls, everything ready for a war. “You’ll be safe here, you can hold out against a siege for weeks.”

“A siege?” I hold Mary on my hip, as if I were a peasant woman seeing a husband off to battle, her own future desperately uncertain. “Why, how close are they going to get to London? They’re coming all the way from Cornwall! They should have been contained in the West Country! Are you leaving us with enough troops? Is London going to stay loyal?”

“Woodstock, I’m going to Woodstock. I can muster troops there and cut off the rebels as they come up the Great West Way. I have to get my troops back from Scotland, as soon as I can. I sent them all north to face the boy and the Scots, I wasn’t expecting this from the southwest. I’m recalling Lord Daubney and his force, I’ve sent orders for them to turn back south at once. I’ll get them back here, if the messenger finds them in time.”

“Lord Daubney is a Somerset man,” I observe.

“What d’you mean by that?” Henry shouts at me in his desperation, and Mary flinches at his raised voice and wails pitifully. I tighten my grip on her little plump body and rock her, stepping from one foot to the other.

I keep my voice low so as not to disturb her, and not to unsettle Henry’s bodyguard, who are lining up grim-faced. “I mean only that it will be hard for his lordship to attack his fellow countrymen,” I say. “He will have to fire on his neighbors. The whole county of Somerset has joined with the Cornishmen, and he will have known Lord Audley from boyhood. I don’t suggest that he will fail you, I just mean that he is a man from the west and he is bound to sympathize with his people. You should put other men round him. Where are your other lords? His kinsmen and peers that would keep him to your side?”

Henry makes a sound, almost a moan of distress, and puts his hand on his horse’s neck as if he needs the support. “Scotland,” he whispers. “I have sent almost everyone north, the whole army and all my cannon and all my money.”

For a moment I am silent, seeing the danger that we are in. All my children including Arthur are in the Tower as the rebels march on London, the army is too distant to recall; if Henry’s small force cannot stop them on the road we will be besieged. “Be brave,” I say, though I am sick with fear myself. “Be brave, Henry. My father was captured once and driven from his kingdom once and he still was a great king of England and died in the royal bed.”

He looks at me bleakly. “I’ve sent Thomas Howard the Earl of Surrey to Scotland. He was against me at Bosworth and I kept him in the Tower for more than three years. Do you think that will have made a friend of him? I have to gamble that marriage to your sister makes him a safe ally for me. You tell me that Daubney is a Somerset man and will sympathize with his neighbors as they march against me. I didn’t even know that. I don’t know any of these men. None of them knows me or loves me. Your father was never alone like me, in a strange land. He married for love, he was followed by men with a passion. He always had people that he could trust.”

We take up battle stations in the Tower, with cannon rolled out, the fires kept burning and the cannonballs stacked beside the guns. We hear that there is a mighty rebel army, perhaps as many as twenty thousand men, marching on London from Cornwall and gathering strength as it marches. That is an army big enough to take the kingdom. Lord Daubney gets south in time to block the Great West Way and we expect that he will turn them back, but he does not even delay them. Some say that he orders his troops to clear the road, and lets them go by.

The rebels come on, nearing London, growing in numbers. They are led by Lord Audley, and we know that other lords must be sending them arms, money, and men. I hear nothing from Henry, I have to trust that he is mustering his men, preparing a force and readying himself to march against them. I have no word from him and he does not write to his mother either, though she spends her days on her knees in the chapel that blazes, night and day, with the light of the votive candles that she has lit for him.

My son Arthur, in the Tower for safety with us, comes to me. “Is my father blocking the rebels’ march?” he asks me.

“I am sure,” I say, though I am not sure.

In his rooms Edward, my cousin, must hear the marching feet, the shouted orders, the changing of the guard at four-hourly intervals. Maggie, who joins me as her husband rides out with mine, is the only one of us who is allowed to see him. She comes to me with her face grave.

“He’s very quiet,” is all she says. “He asked me why we were all here, he knows we are all here in the Tower, and why there was so much noise. When I said that there were rebels marching on London all the way from Cornwall he said—” She breaks off and puts her hand over her mouth.

“What?” I ask. “What did he say?”

“He said that there was not much to come to London for, it is a very dull place. He said someone should tell them that there is no company in London at all, and it is lonely. It’s very, very lonely.”

I am horrified. “Maggie, has he lost his wits?”

She shakes her head. “No, I’m sure not. It’s just that he has been kept alone for so very long, he has almost forgotten how to speak. He is like a child who has had no childhood. Elizabeth—I have failed him. I have failed him so badly.”

I go to embrace her, but she turns away from me and drops a curtsey. “Let me go to my room and wash my face,” she says. “I can’t speak of him. I can’t bear to think of him. I have changed my name and denied my family and left him behind. I have snatched my own freedom and left him in here, like a little bird in a cage, like a blinded songbird.”

“When this is over . . .”

“When this is over it will be even worse!” she exclaims passionately. “All this time we have been waiting for the king to feel safe on his throne; but he never feels safe. When this is over, even if we triumph, the king will still have to face the Scots. He may have to face the boy. The king’s enemies come one after another, he makes no friends and he has new enemies every year. It is never safe enough for him to release my brother. He will never be safe on the throne.”

I clap my hand over her trembling mouth. “Hush, Maggie. Hush. You know better than to talk like this.”

She drops a curtsey and goes from my rooms and I don’t detain her. I know she speaks nothing but the truth and that these battles, between these ill-armed desperate men from the west, the war in the North between the Scots and the English, the mustering rebels in Ireland, and the conflict to come between the boy and the king, will give us a summer of bloodshed and an autumn of reckoning, and nobody can tell what the count will be, or who will be the judge or the victor.

The panic starts at dawn. I can hear the shouted commands and the noise of running feet as the commander of the watch calls out the troops. The tocsin starts to sound a warning and then all the bells through the City of London and beyond, all the bells of England, start to sound as the alarm is given that the Cornishmen have come and now they are not demanding that taxes be forgiven and the king’s false advisors dismissed, now they are demanding that the king be thrown down.

Lady Margaret, the king’s mother, comes out of the chapel, blinking like a frightened owl at the dawn light, and at the uproar inside the Tower. She sees me at the entrance to the White Tower and hurries across the green towards me. “You stay here,” she says harshly. “You’re commanded to stay here for your own safety. Henry said that you were not to leave. You and the children are to stay here.”

She turns towards one of the commanders of the guard, and I realize that she will give the order for my arrest if she thinks for a moment that I am hoping to escape.

“Are you mad?” I suddenly demand bitterly. “I am Queen of England, I am the king’s wife and mother of the Prince of Wales! Of course I am staying here in this, my home city, among my people. Whatever happens I would not leave. Where do you think I would go? I am not the one that spent my life in exile! I did not come in at the head of an army, speaking a foreign language! I am English born and English bred. Of course I am going to stay in London. These are my people, this is my country. Even if they carry arms against me they are still my people and this is still where I belong!”

She wavers in the face of my unexpected fury. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she says. “Don’t be angry, Elizabeth. I am only trying to keep us all safe. I don’t know anything, anymore. Where are the rebels?”

“Blackheath,” I say shortly. “But they have lost a lot of men. They went into Kent and there was a skirmish.”

“Are they opening the city gates to them?” she asks. We can both hear the uproar in the streets. She clutches hold of my arm. “Are the citizens and their militia going to let them into London? Are they going to betray us?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Let’s go up on the walls where we can see what’s happening.”

My Lady, my sisters, Maggie, Arthur and the younger children, and I all go up the narrow stone steps to the perimeter walls of the Tower. We look south and east, to where the river winds out of sight, and we know that, not far away, only seven miles, the Cornish rebels are triumphantly occupying Blackheath, outside our palace of Greenwich, and setting up camp.

“My mother once stood here,” I tell my children. “She was here under siege, just like this, and I was with her, just a little girl.”

“Were you frightened?” six-year-old Henry asks me.

I hug him, and smile to feel him pull away from me. He is eager to stand on his own two feet, he wants to look independent, ready for battle. “No,” I say. “I wasn’t frightened. For I knew that my uncle Anthony would protect us, and I knew that the people of England would never hurt us.”

“I will protect you now,” Arthur promises. “If they come, they will find us ready. I am not afraid.”

At my side, I feel My Lady shrink back. She has no such certainties.

We walk around the walls to the north side, so that we can look down into the streets of the City. The young apprentices are running from house to house, banging on doors and holloaing to summon men to defend the city gates, borrowing weapons from dusty old cupboards, calling for old pikes to be brought out of the cellars. The trained military bands are running down the streets, ready to defend the walls.

“See?” Arthur points them out.

“They’re for us,” I observe to My Lady the King’s Mother. “They’re arming against the rebels. They’re running to the city gates to close them.”

She looks doubtful. I know that she fears that they will throw open the gates as soon as they hear the rebels cry that they will abolish taxes. “Well, anyway, we’re safe in here,” I say. “The Tower gates are shut, the portcullis is down, and we have cannon.”

“And Henry will be coming with his army to rescue us,” My Lady asserts.

Margaret, my cousin, exchanges a quick skeptical look with me. “I am sure he will,” I reply.

In the end it is Lord Daubney, not Henry, who falls on the exhausted Cornishmen as they are resting after their long march from the west. The cavalry go through the sleeping men slashing and hacking as if they were practicing sword thrusts in a hayfield. Some of them carry a mace—a great swinging ball that can knock a man’s head clean from his shoulders, or smash his face into a pulp, even inside a metal helmet. Some of them carry lances and stab and thrust as they go, or battle-axes with a terrible spike at one end that can punch through metal. Henry has planned the battle and put cavalry and archers on the other side of the rebel army so there is no escape for them. The Cornishmen, armed with little more than staves and pitchforks, are like the sheep of their own thin-earth moorland, herded this way and that, rushing in terror trying to get out of the way, hearing the whistle of thousands of arrows, running from the cavalry only to find the infantry, armed with pikes and handguns, stolidly advancing towards them, deaf to all calls of brotherhood.

They beat the Cornishmen to their knees, they go facedown in the mud before they drop their weapons, raise their hands, and offer their surrender. An Gof, their leader, breaks away from the battle and runs for his life, but is ridden down like a leggy broken-winded stag after a long chase. Lord Audley the rebel leader offers his sword to his friend Lord Daubney, who accepts it grim-faced. Neither lord is quite sure if he has been fighting on the right side; it is a most uncertain surrender, in a most ignoble victory.

“We’re safe,” I tell the children, when the scouts come to the Tower to tell us that it is all over. “Your father’s army has beaten the bad men and they are going back to their homes.”

“I wish I had led the army!” Henry says. “I should have fought with a mace. Bash! Swing and bash!” He dances around the room miming holding the reins of a galloping horse with one hand and swinging a mace with his other little fist.

“Perhaps when you are older,” I say to him. “But I hope that we will be at peace now. They will go back to their homes and we can go back to ours.”

Arthur waits for the younger children to be distracted and then he comes to my side. “They’re building gallows at Smithfield,” he says quietly. “An awful lot of them won’t be going back to their homes.”

“It has to be done.” I defend his father to my grave-faced son. “A king cannot tolerate rebels.”

“But he’s selling some of the Cornishmen into slavery,” Arthur tells me flatly.

“Slavery?” I am so shocked that I look at his serious face. “Slavery? Who said so? They must be mistaken?”

“My Lady the King’s Mother told me herself. He’s selling them to barbarian galleys and they’ll be chained to the oars till they die. He’s selling them to be slaves in Ireland. We’ll have no friends in Cornwall for a generation. How can a king sell his people into slavery?”

I look at my son, I see the inheritance we are preparing for him, and I have no answer.

It is a victory, but one so reluctantly won that there is little joy. Henry gives out knighthoods grudgingly, and those who are so honored dread the charges that will come with their new titles. Massive punitive taxes are laid on anyone who sympathized with the rebels, and lords and gentry have to pay huge fines to the Exchequer to guarantee their future good behavior. The leaders of the Cornishmen are briskly tried and hanged, their entrails drawn out of them and then they are quartered, hacked alive as they die in agony. Lord Audley loses his head in a prompt execution when the crowd laugh at his grave face as he puts his head on the block for defending his tenants against his king. Henry’s army pursues the Cornishmen all the way back to Cornwall and they disappear into the lanes which are so shielded with hedges that they are like green tunnels in a green land, and nobody can tell where the traitors have gone, nor what they are doing.

“They’re waiting,” Henry tells me.

“What are they waiting for?” I ask, as if I don’t know.

“For the boy.”

“Where is he now?”

For the first time in many months Henry smiles. “He thinks he is setting out on campaign, financed by the King of Scotland, supported by him.”

I wait in silence, knowing that triumphant beam well enough by now.

“But he is not.”

“No?”

“He is being tricked on board a ship. He is to be handed over to me. James of Scotland has finally agreed that I shall have the boy.”

“You know where he is?”

“I know where he is and I know the name of the ship that he will set sail in: him and his wife and his son. James of Scotland has utterly betrayed him to me, and my allies the Spanish will pick him up at sea, pretending friendship, and bring him to me. And at last, we will make an end of him.”

WOODSTOCK PALACE, OXFORDSHIRE, SUMMER 1497

Then, we lose him again.

The court behaves as if we are on a summer progress, but really we are trapped in the middle of England, afraid to move in one direction or another, waiting for trouble but not knowing where the boy may land. Henry hardly ever leaves his room. At every place where we stay he creates a headquarters ready for a siege, receiving messages, sending out orders, commanding more arms, mustering soldiers, even getting his own armor fitted new, and he readies himself to wear it on the field of battle. But he does not know where the battle will be, as he has no idea where the boy has gone.

Arthur cannot return to Ludlow Castle. “I should be in my principality!” he says to me. “I should be with my people.”

“I know. But your guardian Sir Richard has to command his men in the king’s armies. And while your father does not know where the boy might land, it is safer if we are all together.”

He looks at me, his brown eyes dark with concern. “Mother, when are we going to be at peace?”

I can’t answer him.

One moment the boy was said to be in his love nest with his new bride, beloved of the Scots king, confidently planning another venture; but then we hear that the boy has sailed from Scotland, and disappeared once again, as this boy so skillfully seems to do.

“D’you think he has gone to your aunt?” Henry asks me. Every day he asks me where I think the boy has gone. I have Mary on my knee, and am sitting in a sunny spot in her nursery in a high tower of the beautiful palace. I hold her a little tighter as her father stamps up and down before us, too loud, too big, too furious for a nursery, a man spoiling for a fight and on the edge of losing control. Mary regards him gravely, not at all afraid of him. She watches him as a baby might watch a bearbaiting: a curious spectacle but not one that threatens her.

“Of course I don’t know where he’s gone,” I say. “I can’t imagine. I thought you told me that the Holy Roman Emperor himself had ordered the duchess not to support or succor him?”

“Why would she ever do as she is told?” Henry rounds on me. “Faithless as she is to anything but the House of York? Faithless as she is to anything but ruining my life and destroying my rightful hold on my own kingdom!”

This is too loud for Mary and her lower lip turns down, her face trembles. I turn her towards me and show her a smile. “There,” I say. “Hush. Nothing’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong?” Henry repeats incredulously.

“Nothing for Mary,” I say. “Don’t distress her.”

His angry glance falls on her as if he would shout to warn her that she is in danger, her house on the brink of collapse, thanks to an enemy like a will-o’-the-wisp. “Where is he?” he asks again.

“Surely, you have all the ports watched?”

“Costs me a fortune, but there is not an inch of the coast that is not patrolled.”

“Then if he comes, you will know. Perhaps he has gone back to Ireland.”

“Ireland? What d’you know about Ireland?” he demands, swift as a snake.

“I don’t know!” I protest. “How should I know? It’s just that he was there before. He has friends there.”

“Who? What friends?”

I stand up to face him, holding Mary close. “My lord, I don’t know. If I knew anything, I would tell you. But I know nothing. All I ever hear is what you tell me, yourself. No one else speaks to me of him, and anyway, I would not listen if they did.”

“The Spanish may yet take him,” Henry says, more to himself than to me. “They have promised him their friendship and they will capture him for me. They have promised me that they have ships waiting off the coast for him and he has agreed to meet with them. Perhaps they will—”

There is a sudden loud hammering on the door, Mary cries out, and I clutch her tighter to me and stride across the room, away from the door, towards the bedroom, as if I am running away, suddenly afraid. Henry spins on his heel, his face white. I pause on the threshold of the bedroom door, Henry just a step before me so that when the messenger walks in, dirty from the road, he sees the two of us, pale with fear, as if we are expecting attack. He drops to his knee. “Your Grace.”

“What is it?” Henry demands roughly. “You frightened Her Grace, coming in so loudly.”

“It’s an invasion,” he says.

Henry sways and clutches at the back of the chair. “The boy?”

“No. The Scots. The King of Scots is marching.”

We have to trust Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, my sister Anne’s husband, to save England for Henry. We, who trust nothing and fear everything, have to trust to him; but it is the rain that serves us best. Both the English and the Scots set sieges and are all but destroyed by the unceasing rain. The English troops, camped on wet ground before stoical castles, fall ill, and melt away in the driving mist to their own homes, to warm fires and dry clothes. Thomas Howard cannot keep them loyal, cannot even keep them in their ranks. They don’t want to fight, they don’t care that Henry is defending his kingdom against England’s oldest enemy. They don’t care about him at all.

Thomas Howard stands before Henry in the privy chamber. I am at one side of Henry’s great chair, his mother at the other, as Henry rages at him, accusing him of dishonesty, treachery, faithlessness.

“I could not make the men stay,” Thomas says miserably. “I could not even make their leaders stay. They had no appetite for the fight and there were scant rewards. You don’t know what it was like.”

“Are you saying I don’t go to war?” Henry bursts out.

Thomas shoots a quick horrified glance at me, his sister-in-law. “No, Your Grace, of course not. I only meant that I cannot describe to you how hard this campaign is. It’s very wet and very cold in this part of your country. The food is scanty and it’s hard to get firewood in some places. Some nights the men had to sleep without anything to eat in the cold rain, and wake without breakfast. It’s hard to supply an army and the men had no passion for the fight. Nobody doubts Your Grace’s courage. That has been shown. But it is hard to make the men stand firm in this country in this weather.”

“Enough of this. Can you take the field again?” Henry is biting his lips, his face dark and furious.

“If you command me, Sire,” Surrey says miserably. He knows, as we all do, that any hint of refusal will see him back in the Tower, named as a traitor, his marriage to Anne not enough to save him. Again he glances quickly at me, and sees at once, from my impassive expression, that I cannot help him. “I should be proud to lead your men. I will do my best. But they have gone home. We will have to muster them all over again.”

“I can’t keep hiring men,” Henry decides abruptly. “They won’t serve, and I have no funds to pay them. I shall have to make peace with Scotland. I hear that James is down to the last coin in his treasury too. I shall make peace. And I shall move what men I have left away from the borders. They must come south to be ready.”

“Ready for what?” his mother asks.

I don’t know why she asks, except to hear her own fears in words.

“Ready for the boy.”

WOODSTOCK PALACE, OXFORDSHIRE, AUTUMN 1497

A team of dirty, exhausted messengers rides post, passing the message from one station to another, changing horses as they tire and fall lame, one man pantingly passing a scroll sealed in sheepskin to another. “For the king, at Woodstock Palace!” is all they say, and a new horse and a new man plunges on along the dusty autumn roads, little more than dirt tracks, to ride from dawn till it grows too dark for him to tell the deep sloughs of mud on the road from the overgrown grass of the verge, until he has to sleep, sometimes wrapped in his cloak, under a tree, restlessly waiting for the first light of dawn to thunder to the next post with the precious packet: “For the king, at Woodstock Palace!”

The court is preparing to go out hawking, the riders mounting, the hawk carts with the rows of hooded hawks rolling out of the mews, the falconers running alongside the carts speaking soothingly to the blind birds, promising them sport and feeding if they will be good birds, be steady and patient now, stand proudly on their perches: don’t bate, don’t flap.

Henry is dressed handsomely in dark green velvet with dark green leather riding boots and green leather gloves. He is trying so hard to look like a king living on his own fortune, comfortable with his court, happy in his kingdom, beloved of his people. Only the new lines around his pinched mouth betray him as a man living with gritted teeth.

We are near the open gate of Woodstock Palace when I hear hooves on the road and turn to see a hard-ridden horse and the rider bowed over his neck urging him on. The yeomen of the guard at once gather before the king and six of them turn and stand in a line before me, and I observe, amazed, that they are shouldering their arms and then grounding their pikes. They have seen a single man riding as fast as he can towards our palace and they are readying for an attack. They actually think that a man might ride up to our court as we prepare to go hawking, and cut down Henry, King of England, where he stands. They actually think that they have to stand between me and any subject of this kingdom. I see their fear and I realize that they know nothing of what it is to be a queen of the House of York.

They hold their pikes firm, in a line of defense, as the man hauls on his reins and his weary horse skids almost to a halt and then walks towards us. “Message for the king,” he says, hoarse with the dust in his throat, as Henry recognizes his messenger, puts a hand on one of his beefeaters’ shoulders, turns him away, and approaches the shivering horse and the exhausted rider.

The man jumps from the saddle, but he is so weary that his legs buckle beneath him and he has to grab on the stirrup leather to keep himself up. He puts a hand inside his jacket and pulls out a battered sealed packet.

“Where from?” Henry asks quietly.

“Cornwall. The very far west of Cornwall.”

Henry nods and turns to the court. “I must stay and read this,” he calls. His voice is determinedly light, the smile he is straining to show them all is a grimace, like a man in pain. “A little business, nothing but a little business must detain me. You go on, I’ll ride after!”

People murmur and mount up, and I gesture to my groom to hold my horse as I stand beside Henry and watch them go by. As the hawk cart goes past us, one of the falconers is tying the leather curtains to keep the birds cool and clean till they get to the fields where the hunt will start; then they will take the hoods off and the hawks will mantle their wings and look about them with bright eyes. One of the lads is running behind, carrying spare jesses and leashes. I glimpse his face when he ducks his head in a bow as he goes past the king: Lambert Simnel, promoted from his place as scullery boy, now a royal falconer, loyal in the king’s service—a pretender who has found happiness.

Henry does not even see him. He does not see anybody as he turns and goes into the east door that leads up the great stairs to his presence chamber. I follow, and there is his mother, waiting in his rooms, watching from the window. “I saw the messenger coming from far away,” she says to him quietly, like a woman waiting for the worst news in the world. “I have been praying since the moment I saw the dust on the road. I knew it was the boy. Where has he landed?”

“Cornwall,” he answers. “And I have no friends in Cornwall now.”

It is pointless to tell him that he has no friends in Cornwall now since he broke their pride, and broke their hearts, and hanged the men that they loved and followed. I wait in silence as Henry rips open the wrapping of the letter and takes out the paper. I see the seal of the Earl of Devon, William Courtenay, my sister Catherine’s husband, and the father of her adored son.

“The boy has landed,” Henry says, reading rapidly. “The Sheriff of Devon attacked his camp with a strong force.” He pauses; I see him take a breath. “The sheriff’s men all deserted and went over to the boy as soon as they saw him.”

Lady Margaret presses her hands together as if she is praying but says nothing.

“The Earl of Devon, my brother-in-law.” Henry looks at me as if I am responsible for William Courtenay. “The Earl of Devon, William Courtenay, was going to attack himself but thought they were too strong and he could not trust his men. He’s fallen back to Exeter.” He lifts his head. “The boy has just landed and already he has all of Cornwall and much of Devon; and your brother-in-law has fallen back to Exeter because he cannot trust his men to stay true to him.”

“How many?” I ask. “How many men does the boy have?”

“About eight thousand.” Henry gives a mirthless bark of a laugh. “More than I had, when I landed. It’s enough. It’s enough to take the throne.”

“You were the rightful heir!” his mother says passionately.

“The Earl of Devon, William Courtenay, is trapped in Exeter,” Henry says. “The boy has set a siege.” He turns to his writing table and shouts for clerks. His mother and I step back as the men run into the room and Henry gives orders. Lord Daubney is to march towards the boy’s forces, and relieve William Courtenay in Exeter. Another army commanded by Lord Willoughby de Broke is to hold the south coast so that the boy cannot get away. Every lord in the country is commanded to raise men and horse and meet Henry to march on the West Country. They must all come, there can be no excuses.

“I want him brought to me alive,” Henry says to each of his clerks. “Write that to each commander. He must be taken alive. And tell them to fetch his wife and son too.”

“Where are they?” I ask “His wife and his son?” I cannot bear the thought of the young woman with her baby, the young woman who may be my sister-in-law, in the midst of an army setting a siege.

“St. Michael’s Mount,” Henry says briefly.

My Lady the King’s Mother gives an irritated exclamation at the thought of the boy and his son weaving themselves into the story of Arthur, a legend she has tried so hard to attach to our boy.

The clerks hand over the orders, dripping with hot wax, and Henry stamps them with his seal ring and signs with a spiky up-and-down scratch of the pen HR: Henricus Rex. I think of the proclamation that I saw signed with RR: Ricardus Rex, and know that once again there are two men who claim to be king treading the soil of England, once again there are two rival royal families, and this time I am divided between the two.

We wait. Henry cannot bring himself to go hawking, but sends me out to dine in the tents in the woods with the hunters and to play the part of a queen who thinks that all is well. I take the children with me on their little ponies, and Arthur on his hunter rides proudly at my side. When one of the lords asks me if the king is not coming I say that he will come in a while, he was detained by some business, nothing of importance.

I doubt very much that anyone believes me. The whole court knows that the boy is somewhere off our coasts; some of them will know that he has landed. Almost certainly, some of them will be preparing to join him, they may even have his letter of array in their pockets.

“I’m not afraid,” Arthur tells me, almost as if he is listening to the words and wondering how they sound. “I am not afraid. Are you?”

I show him an honest face and a genuine smile. “I’m not afraid,” I say. “Not at all.”

When I get back to the palace there is a desperate message from Courtenay. The rebels have broken in through the gates of Exeter, and he is wounded. With the walls breached, he has made a truce. The rebel army has been merciful, there has been no looting, they have not even taken him prisoner. Honorably, they release him and in return he has allowed them to go on, along the Great West Way, heading for London, and he has promised he will not pursue them.

“He let them go?” I ask disbelievingly. “To march on London? He promised not to pursue them?”

“No, he’ll break his word,” Henry says. “I will order him to break his word. A promise to rebels like that need not be kept. I’ll order him to trail behind them, block their retreat. Lord Daubney will come down on them from the north, Lord Willoughby de Broke will attack from the west. We will crush them.”

“But he made a promise,” I say uncertainly. “He has given his word.”

Henry’s face is dark and angry. “No promise given to that boy counts before God.”

His servants come in with his hat, his gloves, his riding boots, his cape. Another goes running to the stables to order his horses, the guard is mustering in the yard, a messenger is riding for all the guns and cannon that London has.

“You’re going to your army?” I ask. “You’re riding out?”

“I’ll meet with Daubney and his army,” he says. “We’ll outnumber them by three to one. I’ll fight him with odds like these.”

I catch my breath. “You’re going now?”

He kisses me perfunctorily, his lips cold, and I can almost smell the scent of his fear. “I think we’ll win,” he says. “As far as I can be certain, I think we’ll win.”

“And what will you do then?” I ask. I dare not name the boy and ask what Henry plans for him.

“I will execute everyone who has raised a hand against me,” he says grimly. “I will show no mercy. I will fine everyone who let them march by and did not stop them. When I have finished, there will be no one left in Cornwall and Devon but dead men and debtors.”

“And the boy?” I ask quietly.

“I will bring him into London in chains,” he says. “Everyone has to see that he is a nobody, I will throw him down into the dust and when everyone understands at last that he is a boy and no prince, I will have him killed.”

He looks at my white face. “You will have to see him,” he says bitterly, as if all of this is my fault. “I will want you to look him in the face and deny him. And you had better make sure that you say no word, give no look, not a whisper, not even a breath of recognition. Whoever he looks like, whatever he says, whatever nonsense he spouts when he is asked: you had better be sure that you look at him with the gaze of a stranger, and if anyone asks you, you don’t know him.”

I think of my little brother, the child that my mother loved. I think of him looking at picture books on my lap, or running around the inner courtyard at Sheen with a little wooden sword. I think that it will not be possible for me to see his merry smile and his warm hazel eyes and not reach out to him.

“You will deny him,” Henry says flatly. “Or I will deny you. If you ever, by so much as a word, the whisper of a word, the first letter of a word, give anyone, anyone to understand that you recognize this imposter, this commoner, this false boy, then I will put you aside and you will live and die in Bermondsey Abbey as your mother did. In disgrace. And you will never see any of your children again. I will tell them—each one of them—that their mother is a whore and a witch. Just like her mother, and her mother before that.”

I face him, I rub his kiss from my mouth with the back of my hand. “You need not threaten me,” I say icily. “You can spare me your insults. I know my duty to my position and to my son. I’m not going to disinherit my own son. I will do as I think right. I am not afraid of you, I have never been afraid of you. I will serve the Tudors for the sake of my son—not for you, not for your threats. I will serve the Tudors for Arthur—a true-born king of England.”

He nods, relieved to see his safety in my unquestionable love for my boy. “If any one of you Yorks speaks of the boy other than as a young fool and a stranger, I will have him beheaded that same day. You will see him on Tower Green with his head on the block. The moment that you or your sisters or your cousin or any of your endless cousins or bastard kinsmen recognize the boy is the moment that you sign the warrant for his execution. If anyone recognizes him then they die and he dies. D’you understand?”

I nod my head and I turn away from him. I turn my back on him as if he were not a king. “Of course I understand,” I say contemptuously over my shoulder. “But if you are going to continue to claim that he is the son of a drunken boatman from Tournai, you must remember not to have him beheaded like a prince on Tower Green. You’ll have to have him hanged.”

I shock him, he chokes on a laugh. “You’re right,” he says. “His name is to be Pierre Osbeque, and he was born to die on the gallows.”

With ironic respect I turn back to him and sweep a curtsey, and in this moment I know that I hate my husband. “Clearly, we will call him whatever you wish. You can name the young man’s corpse whatever you wish, that will be your right as his murderer.”

We do not reconcile before he rides out and so my husband goes out to war with no warm farewell embrace from me. His mother gives him her blessing, clings to his reins, watches him go while she whispers her prayers, and looks curiously at me, as I stand dry-eyed and watch him ride off at the head of his guard, three hundred of them, to meet with Lord Daubney.

“Are you not afraid for him?” she asks, her eyes moist, her old lips trembling. “Your own husband, going out to war, to battle? You did not kiss him, you did not bless him. Are you not afraid for him riding into danger?”

“Really, I doubt very much that he’ll get too close,” I say cruelly, and I turn and go inside to the second-best apartment.

EAST ANGLIA, AUTUMN 1497

The king keeps all England informed as the rebellion disappears, and then melts away, before his carefully slow advance. The Cornishmen slip away every night as they realize that not one, not two, but three armies are mustered and slowly marching on them, and one night the boy goes too, taking a wild ride with only two companions, escaping the teeth of the trap that Henry has set for him, gaining the coast, learning of the ships waiting offshore to capture him, and plunging into the sanctuary of Beaulieu Abbey.

But England is not as it was. The king’s writ runs up to the high altar now, his mother and her friend the archbishop have made sure of that. There is no sanctuary for the boy though he claims it as a king ordained by God to rule. The abbey breaks its own time-honored traditions, and hands over the boy. Unwillingly, he has to come out to make his surrender to a king who rules England and the Church too.

He came out wearing cloth of gold, and answering to the name of Richard IV—a hastily scribbled note which I guess is from my half brother, Thomas Grey, is tucked under my stirrup when I am taking the children out on their ponies. I did not see the hand that tied it to the stirrup leathers and I can be sure that no one will ever say that I saw it and read it. But when the king questioned him, he denied himself. So be it. Mark it well. If he himself denies it, we can deny him.

I scrunch the paper into a tiny ball and tuck it in my pocket to burn later. It is good of Thomas to let me know, and I am glad that the boy saw one friendly face in a room full of enemies, before he denied himself.

The rest of the news I have, as the court has it, as England has it, in long triumphant dispatches from Henry that are written by him personally, to be read aloud, throughout the country. He sends verbose announcements to the kings of Christendom. I imagine Henry’s words bawled out at every village marketplace, at every town cross, on the steps of country churches, at the entrance to staple halls. He writes as if he were creating a story, and I read it almost smiling, as if my husband were setting up to be a Chaucer, to give the people of England a tale of their beginnings, an entertainment and an explanation. He becomes the historian of his own triumph, and I cannot be the only person who thinks that he has imagined a victory that he did not experience in the windswept fields of Devon. This is Henry the romancer, not Henry a true king.

Henry’s story is that there was once a poor man, a man who kept the watergate at Tournai in Flanders. He was a weak man, a bit of a drunkard, married to a common woman, a bit of a fool, and they had a son, a silly boy who ran away from home and fell into bad company, serving as a page to someone (it doesn’t matter much who or why) and went to the court of Portugal and for some reason (for who knows what silly lads will say?) passed himself off as a prince of England and everyone believed him. Then, suddenly he became a servant for a silk merchant. He learned to speak English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese (which is a little surprising but presumably not impossible). Dressed in his master’s clothes, showing off the goods for sale, parading himself like a May Day pageant in Ireland, he was again mistaken for a prince (don’t pause to ask if such a thing is likely) and was persuaded to take on the pretense all across Christendom—to what end and why is never discussed.

How such a poor ignorant boy from a common home should fool the greatest kings of Christendom, the Duchess of Burgundy, the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of France, the King of Scotland, should delight the court of Portugal and tempt the monarchs of Spain, Henry does not say. It is part of the magic of the fairy tale, like a goose-girl who is really a princess, or a girl who cannot sleep on a pea even when it is covered by twenty feather mattresses. Amazingly, this common, vulgar, ill-educated boy, the son of a drunkard and a fool, engages the richest, most cultured men in Christendom, so that they put their wealth and their armies at his disposal. How he learns to speak four languages and Latin, how he learns to read and write with an elegant hand, how he learns to hunt and joust, hawk and dance so that people admire him as a courageous graceful prince, though he was raised in the backstreets of Tournai, Henry doesn’t say. How he learns the royal smile, the casual warm acknowledgment of homage, Henry does not even consider in his long account, though of all the men in the world he would have been the most struck by this. This is a story of magic: a common boy puts on a silk shirt, and everyone falls for the illusion that he has royal blood.

As my half brother wrote to me that one time: So be it.

I receive only one private letter from Henry during this busy time as he writes and rewrites explanations of how the boy, John Perkin, Piers Osbeque, Peter Warboys—for Henry offers several different names—made his transformation to prince and back again.

I am sending his wife to join you at court, Henry writes, knowing that there is no need for him to say whose wife is joining me. You will be surprised at her beauty and elegance. You will oblige me by making her welcome and comforting her in the cruel deceit that has been played on her.

I hand his letter to his mother, who stands with her hand out, waiting impatiently to read it. Of course, the boy’s wife has been cruelly, amazingly deceived. Her husband wore a silk shirt and she was blinded by beautiful tailoring. She could not see that beneath it he was a common little boy from Flanders. Easily deluded, amazingly deluded, she saw the shirt and thought he was a prince, and married him.

PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, AUTUMN, 1497

I sit in my rooms waiting for the woman that we are to call Lady Katherine Huntly. She is not to be known by her married name; I suspect that no one is yet quite sure of her married name, whether it is Perkin or Osbeque or Warboys.

“She is to be considered as a single woman,” My Lady the King’s Mother announces to my ladies. “I expect the marriage will be annulled.”

“On what grounds?” I ask.

“Deception,” she replies.

“In what way was she deceived?” I ask demurely.

“Obviously.” My Lady snubs me.

“Not much of a deception, if it was obvious,” Maggie whispers tartly.

“And where is her child to be housed, My Lady?” I ask.

“He is to live away from court with his nursemaid,” My Lady says. “And we are not to mention him.”

“They say that she’s very beautiful,” my sister Cecily volunteers, sweet as Italian powders.

I smile at Cecily, my face and my eyes quite blank. If I want to save my throne, my freedom, and the life of the baby of the boy who calls himself my brother, I am going to have to endure the arrival of Lady Katherine, a beautiful, single princess, and much, much more.

I can hear the noise of her guard outside the door, the quick exchange of passwords, and then the door is thrown open. “Lady Katherine Huntly!” the man bellows quickly, as if they fear that someone might say: “Queen Katherine of England.”

I stay seated, but my Lady the King’s Mother surprises me by rising from her chair. My ladies sink down, as low as if they were honoring a woman of full royal blood, as the young woman comes into the room.

She is wearing black, in mourning as if she is a widow, but her cape and gown are beautifully made, beautifully tailored. Who would have thought that Exeter had such seamstresses? She is wearing a black satin dress trimmed with rich black velvet, a black hat on her head, a black riding cloak over her arm, she is wearing gloves of black embroidered leather. Her eyes are dark, hollowed in her pale face, her skin utterly clear, like the finest palest marble. She is a beautiful young woman in her early twenties. She curtseys low to me and I see her scanning my face, as if she is looking for some resemblance to her husband. I give her my hand and I rise to my feet and I kiss one cool cheek and then another for she is cousin to the King of Scotland, whoever she married, whatever the quality of the silk of his shirt. I feel her hand tremble in mine and again I see that wary look as if she would read me, as if she would know where I stand in this unfolding masque which her life has become.

“We welcome you to court,” My Lady says. There is no careful reading needed for My Lady. She is doing what her son requested, welcoming Lady Katherine to court with such kindliness that even the most hospitable host would have to wonder why we are making such a fuss of this woman, the disgraced wife of our defeated enemy.

Lady Katherine curtseys again and stands before me as if I am going to interrogate her. “You must be tired,” is all I say.

“His Grace the King was most kind,” she says. She speaks with such a strong Scots accent that I have to strain to understand her soft voice with the enchanting lilt. “I had good horses and we rested on the way.”

“Please be seated,” I say. “We will dine in a little while.”

Composedly, she takes her seat, folds her hands in her black silk lap, and looks at me. I note her earrings of black and the only other piece of jewelry that she wears, a gold brooch that is pinned to her belt: two gold hearts entwined. I permit myself a small smile, and there is an answering warmth in her eyes. I imagine that we are never going to say more than this.

We line up to prepare to enter the hall for dinner. I go first as queen, My Lady walks at my shoulder, slightly behind me, and Lady Katherine Huntly must come next, my sisters taking one step down the order of precedence. I glance back and see Cecily’s pale face, her lower lip pressed tight. She is now fourth behind me, and she does not like it.

“Is Lady Huntly going to return to Scotland?” I ask My Lady the King’s Mother, as we proceed into dinner.

“Surely she will,” My Lady replies. “What would she stay here for? Once her husband is dead?”

But apparently she is in no hurry to leave. She stays until my husband has completed his slow progress from Exeter to the palace. The outriders come into the stable yard and send a message to my rooms that the king is approaching and expects a formal welcome. I order my ladies to come with me and we go down the broad stone stairs to the double entrance doors, which are held wide open, welcoming the return of the hero. We arrange ourselves at the head of the steps. My Lady the King’s Mother’s ladies stand beside us, she makes sure she is on the same step as me so that I am not more prominent, and we wait in the bright autumn sunshine, listening for the clatter of the horses’ hooves.

“Has he sent the boy directly to the Tower?” Maggie asks me as she bends to pull out the train of my gown.

“He must have done,” I say. “What else would he do with him?”

“He hasn’t . . .” She hesitates. “He hasn’t killed him on the way here?”

I glance at the boy’s wife, all in black like a widow. She is wearing her black velvet cape against the cold and the gold brooch of twin hearts is pinned at the neck.

“I haven’t heard,” I say. I cannot help a little shiver. “Surely he would have sent word if he had done that? To the boy’s wife if not to me? Surely I would have known?”

“Surely he wouldn’t have executed him without a public announcement,” she says uncertainly.

Behind us, in the darkened hall, I hear the constant ripple of noise as the servants come through and run down the stairs to the stable yard so that they can line the road to watch the king come home in triumph.

First we hear the king’s trumpets, a victorious bray of sound, and everyone cheers. Then there is another noise—a ridiculous “tootle-toot-toot!” from someone on the roadside, and everyone laughs. I feel Maggie stand a little closer, as if we are somehow threatened by the “toot-toot” of a toy trumpet.

Around the corner come the first riders, half a dozen standard bearers carrying the royal standard, the cross of St. George, the Beaufort portcullis, and the Tudor rose. There is a red dragon on a white and green ground, and a red rose for Lancaster. Only the Round Table of Camelot is missing from this ridiculous display. It is as if the king is showing all of his badges, naming all of his antecedents, as if he is trying to demonstrate his claim to the throne that he only won by force of arms, as if he is trying once again to convince everyone that he is the rightful king.

Then he comes, wearing his enameled breastplate but no helmet so that he looks martial and brave, about to fight a battle or a joust. He is beaming, a broad bright confident smile, and when the servants on the roadside and the people from the nearby villages, who have been running alongside the procession and now line the road, cheer and wave their hats, Henry nods to one side and the other as if agreeing with them.

Behind him come his usual companions, the men of his court. No one else is in armor, the rest are all dressed for a day’s ride, booted, caped, one or two in quilted jackets, and among them, a young man I don’t know, who attracts my attention in the first moment, and then I find that I can’t look away from him.

He is dressed like all the others, with good leather boots—his a dark tan color—a good pair of brown breeches, a thick jacket fitted across his broad shoulders, and his riding cape rolled and belted on the saddle behind him. His bonnet is of brown velvet and at the front of it he has a beautiful brooch with three pendant pearls. I know him at once, not by the brooch but by the golden brown of his hair and his merry smile, my mother’s merry smile, and the proud set of his head that is just how my father used to ride. It is him. It has to be him. It is the boy. He has not been sent to the Tower, nor brought wrapped in chains, nor tied backwards on his horse with a straw hat crammed on his head to shame him. He rides behind the king like one of his companions, like a friend, almost as if he were a kinsman.

Someone points him out to the people on the roadside and they start to jeer, an ugly noise, and someone shouts, “Traitor!” Someone else makes a mock bow, and a woman screams, “Smiling now! You won’t smile for long!”

But he does smile. He lifts his head and he nods in acknowledgment to one side or the other, and when some silly girl, taken by his easy charm, shouts “Hurrah!” instead of an insult, he sweeps his hat from his head with all the charm and easiness of my father, King Edward, who could never ride past a pretty woman on the roadside without throwing her a wink.

Bare-headed in the bright autumn sunshine, I can see how his gold hair shines. This boy’s hair is straight, cut long and smooth, falling to his shoulders, but I can see where it curls on his collar at the back. His eyes are brown, his face tanned by the weather, his eyelashes long and dark. He is the most handsome man in the whole court, and beside him, dressed in his shiny new armor, my husband the king looks like a man trying very hard.

The boy is looking anxiously at the ladies of the court as they stand, waiting on the steps, until he sees his wife, and he throws her the cheekiest grin, as if they were not in the most terrible circumstances that anyone could imagine. I glance sideways at her, and see a different young woman altogether. The color has flooded into her pale cheeks, her eyes are bright, she is dancing a little on the spot and gazing at him, blind to the king and the parade of banners, radiant, as if the joy of seeing him is greater than any other worry in the world. As if it does not matter very much what circumstances they are in, as long as they are together.

And then he looks from her to me.

He knows me at once. I see him take in the elegance of my gown, the deference of my ladies, and that I hold myself like a queen. I see him note my high headdress and my richly embroidered dress. Then he looks into my face and his smile, his roguish laughing smile, just like my mother’s irreverent joy, shines through. It is a smile of complete confidence, of recognition, of delight in his return. I have to bite the inside of my cheek to prevent myself from running forwards to greet him with my arms open wide. But I cannot stop my heart lifting and I feel myself glowing as if I want to cheer. He’s home. The boy who calls himself my brother Richard is home at last.

Henry holds up his hand for the cavalcade to halt and a page boy flings himself from his horse and rushes to take the king’s bridle. Henry dismounts heavily, his armor clattering, and he walks up the shallow steps towards me and kisses me warmly on the mouth, turns to his mother and bows his head for her blessing.

“Welcome home, my lord,” I say formally, loudly enough for everyone to hear my greeting. “And blessing on your great victory.”

Oddly, he does not make any formal reply, though the clerks are waiting to record his words at this moment of history. He turns a little to one side and then I see him gasp—just a tiny little betraying breath—as he sees her: the boy’s wife. I see the color rise in his cheeks, I see how his eyes brighten. He steps towards Lady Katherine and he does not know what to say; like a lovestruck page he is breathless at the sight of her and wordless when he should speak.

She drops him a low, deferential curtsey and when she rises up he takes her hand. I see her lower her eyes modestly, and the little hint of her smile, and finally I understand why she has been sent to be my lady-in-waiting, and why her husband rides freely among the king’s men. Henry has fallen in love for the first time in his life, and with the worst choice he could possibly have made.

His mother, who was watching every step of her son’s victorious arrival, invites me to her rooms that evening before the grand victorious dinner. She tells me that Henry has appointed two of my ladies-in-waiting and taken two from her court to serve Lady Katherine until he can find suitable ladies to wait on her. Apparently Lady Katherine is to have a little court of her own, and her own rooms; she is to live as a visiting princess of Scotland and be served on bended knee.

Lady Katherine has been invited to go to the royal wardrobe to choose a gown suitable for the feast to celebrate the king’s victory. It seems that the king would like to see her wear another color, other than black.

I remember, wryly, that once I was commanded to wear a gown of the same cut and color as Queen Anne, and that everyone remarked how beautiful I was, standing beside her in a matching gown, and her husband could not take his eyes off me. It was the Christmas feast before the queen died, and she and I wore the same red gown, except she wore it as if it were her shroud, poor lady, she was so white and thin. I stood beside her and the color scarlet put a flush in my cheek and brightened the gold of my hair and the sparkle in my eyes. I was young, and in love, and I was heartless. I think of her now, and her calm dignity when she saw me dance with her husband, and I wish I could tell her that I am sorry, and that now I understand far more than I did then.

“Have you asked the king when Lady Katherine is going home?” My Lady demands abruptly. She is standing with her back towards a mean fire, her hands tucked into her sleeves. The rest of the room is cold.

“No,” I say. “Will you ask him?”

“I will!” she exclaims. “I certainly will. Have you asked him when Pero Osbeque is to go to the Tower?”

“Is that his name now?”

She flushes, furious. “Whatever he is called. Peter Warboys, whatever they call him.”

“I have had very little speech with His Grace,” I say. “Of course his lords and the gentlemen from London wanted to ask him about the battle and so he went to his presence chamber with them all.”

“Was there a battle?”

“Not really, no.”

She takes a breath and looks at me, a sly cautious look as if she is unsure of her ground. “The king seems very taken with Lady Katherine.”

“She’s a very beautiful woman,” I agree.