My mother, my sisters, and I rise from our seats and curtsey to her as equals. The height of this curtsey has been difficult to decide. We offer a middling one and Lady Margaret ducks in a shallow bob. Though my mother is now known as mere Lady Grey, she was crowned Queen of England and this woman was her lady-in-waiting. Now, although Lady Margaret sails in the royal barge, her son has not yet been crowned king. Though she calls herself My Lady the King’s Mother, he has not yet had the crown of England placed on his head. He just grabbed the circlet that Richard wore on his helmet and has to wait for his coronation.

I close my eyes quickly at the thought of the gold crown on the helmet, and Richard’s smiling brown eyes looking at me through the visor.

“I would speak with Mistress Elizabeth alone,” Lady Margaret says to my mother, not troubling with any word of greeting.

“Her Grace the Princess Elizabeth of York can take you to my privy chamber,” my mother says smoothly.

I lead the way. I can feel my back under her scrutiny as I walk and at once I become conscious of myself. I fear that I am swinging my hips, or tossing my head. I open the door and go into my mother’s private room and turn to face Lady Margaret, as she seats herself without invitation in the great chair.

“You may sit,” she says, and I take a chair opposite to her and wait. My throat is dry. I swallow and hope that she does not notice.

She looks me up and down as if I am applying for a post in her household and then slowly she smiles. “You are lucky in your looks,” she says. “Your mother was always a beauty and you are very like her: fair, slender, skin like a rose petal and that wonderful hair, gold and bronze all at once. Undoubtedly you will have beautiful children. I suppose you are still proud of your looks? I suppose you are still vain?”

I say nothing, and she clears her throat and remembers the reason for her visit.

“I have come to speak with you in private, as a friend,” she says. “We parted on bad terms.”

We parted like a pair of fishwives. But I was sure then that my lover would kill her son and make me Queen of England. Now, as it turns out, her son has killed my lover and my fate is entirely in her white, heavily ringed hands.

“I regret it,” I say with simple insincerity.

“I too,” she says, which surprises me. “I am to be your mother-in-law, Elizabeth. My son will marry you, despite everything.”

There is no point in my sudden pulse of anger at the “despite everything.” We are defeated, my hopes of happiness and being a beloved Queen of England went down under the hooves of the Stanley horsemen commanded by her husband.

I bow my head. “Thank you.”

“I will be a good mother to you,” she says earnestly. “You will find, when you come to know me, that I have great love to give, that I have a talent for loyalty. I am determined to do the will of God and I am certain that God has chosen you to be my daughter-in-law, the wife of my son, and”—her voice drops to an awed whisper at the thought of my destiny, at the divine promise of the Tudor line—“the mother of my grandson.”

I bow my head again, and when I look up, I see that her face is shining; she is quite inspired.

“When I was a little girl, no more than a child myself, I was called on to give birth to Henry,” she whispers, as if in prayer. “I thought I would die from the pain, I was certain it would kill me. I knew then that, if I survived, the child and I would have a great future, the greatest future that could be. He would be King of England and I would put him on the throne.”

There is something very moving about her rapt expression, like a nun describing her vocation.

“I knew,” she says. “I knew that he was to be king. And when I met you, I knew that you were destined to bear his son.” She turns her intense gaze on me. “That is why I was hard on you, that is why I was so furious with you when I saw you straying from your path. That is why I couldn’t stand it when I saw you falling from your position, from your destiny, from your calling.”

“You think I have a calling?” I am whispering, she is so completely convincing.

“You will be the mother of the next King of England,” she declares. “The red rose and the white, a rose without a thorn. You will have a son, and we will call him Arthur of England.” She takes my hands. “This is your destiny, my daughter. I will help you.”

“Arthur.” Wonderingly, I repeat the name that Richard chose for the son he hoped to have with me.

“It is my dream,” she says.

It was our dream too. I let her hold my hands and I don’t pull away.

“God has brought us together,” she tells me earnestly. “God has brought you to me, and you are going to give me a grandson. You are going to bring peace to England, you are going to be the peace which ends the Cousins’ War. Elizabeth, you will be a peacemaker and God Himself will call you blessed.”

Amazed at her vision, I let her hold my hands in her firm grip, and I don’t disagree.

I never tell my mother what passed between me and My Lady the King’s Mother. She raises an eyebrow at my discretion but does not ask me more. “At any rate, she said nothing to make you think that she has changed her mind about the betrothal,” she confirms.

“On the contrary, she assured me that we will marry. It will go ahead. She promised to be my friend.”

My mother hides a smile. “How kind,” is all she says. “Helpful of her.”

So we wait, with some confidence, for our invitation to the coronation, expecting to be told to go to the royal wardrobe to be fitted for our gowns. Cecily, especially, is desperate for her new robes and for the chance for us all to be seen in the world as the five York princesses once more. Only when Henry has reversed the Act of Parliament that named us as bastards and our parents’ marriage as a bigamous fraud can we wear our ermine and crowns once again. Henry’s coronation will be our first chance since Richard’s death to appear to the world in our true colors as princesses of York once again.

I am confident that we will all attend his coronation; yet, still, no word comes. I am certain that he must want his future wife to watch him take the crown on his head and the scepter in his hand. Even if he has no curiosity to see me, how can he not want to demonstrate his victory before us, the previous royal family? Surely he will want me to see him at his moment of greatest glory?

I feel more like a sleeping princess in a fairy story than the woman who is promised in marriage to the new King of England. I may live in the royal palace, and sleep in one of the best rooms, I may be served with courtesy though without the bended knee that people must show to the royal family. But I live here quietly, without a court, without the usual crowd of flatterers, friends, and petitioners, without sight of the king: a princess without a crown, a betrothed without a bridegroom, a bride with no date for her wedding.

God knows that once I was well enough known as Henry’s betrothed. When he was an exiled pretender to the throne, he swore in Rennes Cathedral itself that he was King of England and I was his bride. But, of course, that was when he was mustering his army for his invasion, desperate for support from the House of York and all of our adherents. Now he has won the battle and sent his army away, perhaps he would like to be free of his promise too, as a weapon he needed then, but does not need now.

My mother has seen to it that we all have new gowns; all five of us princesses of York are exquisitely dressed. But we have nowhere to go, and no one ever sees us, and we are called not “Your Grace” as princesses, but “my lady” as if we were the bastard daughters of a bigamous marriage and my mother was not a dowager queen but the widow of a country squire. We are all no better off than Cecily, whose marriage has now been annulled but without a new husband on offer. She is not Lady Scrope but neither is she anything else. We are all girls without a name, without a family, without certainty. And girls like this have no future.

I had assumed that I would be restored as a princess, given my fortune, and married and crowned in one great ceremony at Henry’s side; but the silence tells me that he is not an eager bridegroom.

No message comes from the royal wardrobe bidding us to come and pick out our gowns for the coronation procession. The Master of the Revels does not ask if he may come to the palace to teach us our dance for the coronation dinner. All the seamstresses and tirewomen in London are working day and night on gowns and headdresses: but not for us. Nobody is sent to us from the Lord Chamberlain’s offices with instructions for the procession. We are not invited to stay in the Tower of London the night before the ceremony, as is the tradition. No horses are ordered for us to ride from the Tower to Westminster Abbey, no ruling comes as to the order of precedence on the day. Henry sends no gifts as a bridegroom should to his bride. Nothing at all comes from his mother. Where there should be bustle and business and a host of conflicting instructions from a new king and a new court anxious to look well, there is a silence that grows more and more noticeable as the days go on.

“We’re not going to be invited to the coronation,” I say flatly to my mother when I am alone with her, as she comes to say good night to me in the bedroom that I share with Cecily. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t think we are.”

“How can he not have me there at his side?”

Slowly, she goes to the window and looks out at the dark night sky and the silvery moon. “I think they don’t want a host of Yorks beside the throne, so close to the crown,” she says dryly.

“Why not?”

She takes the shutters and latches them, as if to shut out the silvery light that shines on her, giving her an unearthly radiance. “I don’t know why for sure,” she says. “But I suppose, if I was Henry’s mother, I would not want my child, a pretender, a usurper, king only by right of battle, taking his crown alongside a princess, a true-bred princess of the royal family, beloved of the people, and a beauty. Apart from anything else I would not like how it looked.”

“Why? What does he look like?” I demand.

“Ordinary.” My mother condemns him in one damning word. “He’s very, very ordinary.”

Slowly it becomes clear to us all, even to Cecily, who is frantically hopeful almost up to the last day, that the new king will be crowned alone, and that he does not want me, distractingly beautiful, the only true royal, before the altar at his side. He will not even have us, the former royal family, as witnesses when he puts his hand on my lover’s crown, the crown worn by the man I loved, and by my father before him.