He is subdued at leaving his home, while little Geoffrey is excited by the journey and Ursula starts brightly and then starts to whimper. Reginald never asks me where we are going, and then I start to imagine that somehow he already knows, and that he wants to avoid the conversation as I do.

Only on the very last morning, as we are riding on the towpath beside the river towards Sheen, do I say: “We’ll soon be there. This will be your new home.”

He looks up at me from his little pony. “Our new home?”

“No,” I say shortly. “I am going to stay nearby, just a little way across the river.”

He says nothing, and I think perhaps he has not understood.

“I have often lived apart from you,” I remind him. “When I had to go to Ludlow, and I left you at Stourton.”

He turns his wide-eyed face towards me. He does not say, “But then I was with my brothers and sister and with all the people I had known all my life, my nurse in the nursery, my tutor who taught my brothers and me.” He just looks at me, uncomprehending. “You will not leave me alone?” he finally asks. “In a strange place? Mother? You will not just leave me?”

I shake my head. I can hardly trust myself to speak. “I will visit you,” I whisper. “I promise.”

The high towers of the priory come into sight, the gate opens, and the prior himself comes out to greet me, takes Reginald by the hand, and helps him down from the saddle.

“I will come and see you,” I promise from high on my horse, looking down at the golden crown of his bowed head. “And you will be allowed to visit me.”

He looks very small as he stands beside the prior. He does not pull away or show any defiance, but he turns up his pale face and he looks at me with his dark eyes and he says clearly: “Lady Mother, let me come with you and my brother and sister. Don’t leave me here.”

“Now, now,” says the prior firmly. “Let’s have no words from children who should always be silent before their elders and betters. And in this house, you will only speak when you are ordered to do so. Silence, holy silence. You will learn to love it.”

Obediently, Reginald folds his lower lip under his teeth, and says not another word; but still he looks at me.

“I shall visit you,” I say helplessly. “You will be happy here. It is a good place. You will serve God and the Church. You will be happy here, I am sure.”

“Give you good day.” The prior hints me away. “Better done quickly, since it has to be done.”

I turn my horse’s head and I look back at my son. Reginald is only six; he looks very small beside the prior. He is pale with fear. Obediently, he says nothing, but his little mouth forms the silent word: Mother!

There is nothing I can do. There is nothing I can say. I turn my horse’s head, and I ride away.

SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, WINTER 1506

I will never forgive the Tudors for this heartbreak. They have waded to the throne through the blood of my kinsmen. They pulled my uncle Richard from the mud of Bosworth Field, stripped him naked, slung him over his own saddle, and then threw him into an unmarked grave. My own brother was beheaded to reassure King Henry; my cousin Elizabeth died trying to give him another son. They married me to a poor knight to bring me low, and now he is dead and I am lower than I imagined a Plantagenet could sink. All this—all this!—to legitimize their claim to a throne which in any case they took by conquest.

And clearly, the Tudors take little joy in their triumph and our subjection. Since the death of his wife, our princess, the king is uncertain of his court, anxious about his subjects, and terrified by us Plantagenets of the House of York. For years he has poured money into the pockets of the Emperor Maximilian, paying him to betray my cousin, Edmund de la Pole, the York claimant to the throne of England, and send him home to his death. Now I learn that the deal has been done. The emperor takes the money and promises Edmund that he will be safe, showing him the letter of safe conduct from the king, signed in his own hand. It is a guarantee that Edmund can come home. Edmund believes the assurances of Henry Tudor, he trusts the word of an ordained king. He sees the signature, he checks the seal. Henry Tudor swears he will have safe passage and an honest welcome. Edmund is a Plantagenet; he loves his country, he wants to come home. But the moment he walks under the portcullis of Calais Castle he is arrested.

This starts a chain of accusations that tears through my kinsmen like scissors through silk, and now I am on my knees praying for their lives. My cousin William Courtenay, already under arrest, is now charged with treasonous plotting. My kinsman William de la Pole in the Tower is questioned harshly in his cell. My cousin Thomas Grey falls under suspicion, for nothing more than dining with Cousin Edmund, years ago, before he fled from the country. One after another the men of my family disappear into the Tower of London, forced to endure solitude and fear, persuaded to name other dinner guests, and held in that dark keep, or secretly sent overseas to Calais Castle.

SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1507

I see my little boy Reginald only once every three months, when they send him across the river to me by a hired rowing boat. He comes as he is commanded, cold and huddled in the prow of the little wherry. He can stay for only one night and then he has to go again. They have taught him to be silent, they have taught him very well; he keeps his eyes down and his hands at his side. When I run to greet him and hug him closely, he is stiff and unwilling, as if my lively, talkative son is dead and buried and all I have left to hold is this cold little headstone.

Ursula, nearly nine years old, seems to grow every day, and I let down the hems of her secondhand gowns again and again. Two-year-old Geoffrey’s toes are pressed up against the front of his little boots. When I put him to bed at night, I stroke his feet and pull his toes as if I can stop them growing twisted and cramped. The rents from Stourton are collected and faithfully sent to me, but I have to hand them to the abbey for our keep. I don’t know where Geoffrey will go when he is too old to stay here. Perhaps both he and Ursula will have to be sworn to the Church like their brother Reginald, and disappear into silence. I spend hours on my knees praying to God to send me a sign, or send me some hope, or simply send me some money; sometimes I think that when my last two children are safely locked up inside the Church, I will tie a great sack of stones to my belt and walk into the cold deeps of the River Thames.

SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1508

Then the danger comes a step closer to me: the king arrests my cousin Thomas Grey, and my cousin George Neville, Lord Bergavenny, who is keeping my two boys, Henry and Arthur. George leaves my boys at his home in Kent and enters the Tower, where people have started to whisper that the king himself visits nightly to oversee the torture of the men he suspects. The pedlar who comes to the door of the abbey with chapbooks and rosaries for sale tells Porteress Joan that in the City they are saying that the king has become a monster who likes to hear the cries of pain: “a Moldwarp.” He whispers the old word for a cursed mole who works in darkness among dead and buried things, who undermines his own pastures.

I am desperate to send for my boys, to take them away from the household of a man who has been arrested as a traitor. But I do not dare. I am afraid to draw attention to myself, almost in seclusion, almost in hiding, almost in sanctuary. I must not alert the Tudor spy system to Reginald, kept in silence at the Charterhouse at Sheen, Ursula and I hidden by our devotions at Syon, or Geoffrey, the most precious of them all, clinging to my side as the nuns know that there is nowhere that he can go, that even a child of three years cannot be allowed out into the world, since there is no doubt that Henry Tudor, scenting Plantagenet blood, will sniff him out.

This is a king who has become a dark mystery to his people. He’s not like the kings of my house—open, joyful sensualists who ruled by agreement and made their way by charm. This king spies on his people, imprisons them on a word, tortures them so they accuse and counteraccuse each other and, when he has evidence of treason, amazingly he forgives them, releasing them with a pardon, but burdened by fines so terrible that they will never be free of service to him, not through half a dozen generations. This is a king driven by fear and ruled by greed.

My second cousin George Neville, my boys’ guardian, comes out of the Tower tight-lipped about a limp which looks as if his leg has been broken and left to set crooked, poorer by a fortune, but free. My other cousins are still imprisoned. George Neville tells no one what agreement he made inside those damp walls; silently he pays the king half of his income every quarter and never complains. He has fines so heavy that twenty-six of his friends have to serve as guarantors, and he is forbidden ever to go home to his beloved house in Kent, or to Surrey, Sussex, or Hampshire. He is an exile in his own country though he has been charged with nothing, and nothing has been proved against him.