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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She nods.

“But why?”

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

“Nobody thinks you are an enemy.”

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










WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1491

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

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

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

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

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

“Who is he?” I ask very quietly.

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

“How old is he?”

“Eighteen,” he says simply.

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

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

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

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

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

“Not again? Not another invasion?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She knows all about this boy already.”

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

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

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

“He is a handsome boy?” I whisper.

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