“Then you too will leave me,” she said finally, but I knew that she was also unconvinced of Arthur’s merit. A manservant entered and Brutus jumped from Frankie’s arms and skittered to the door.

“It is time, my lady,” he said, closing the door to trap the dog. Frankie stood to pin the veil on my hat where it had come loose.

Muffled against the gelid December day, we walked through the palace to the King’s Way, where scaffolding had been erected for noble ladies of the Court to watch the passing bier. There was no sound but the distant thump of great drums that made manifest the absence of the Prince’s heartbeat.

I brooded, as did we all that day, upon death. I had survived childbed six times but would I outlive the younger Arthur? Would my children, and perhaps grandchildren, gather around my bed as they had for George? When I was a child and my first little tooth wobbled out of my gums, I was upset that my body had a will beyond my control. The same feeling assailed me again when my menses came and each time I became pregnant. How would I be, I wondered, when illness, not the short illnesses of life but the chronic and final diseases of death, began to overtake me? How strange I found it, not to know when and how a moment of such import would occur.

As the drummers turned the corner, I could feel vibrations in the cavities of my body; there was profundity in bearing witness to a moment that would change the course of all our lives and the lives of those to come. The first mourners of the procession passed before us, at least five hundred in front of the catafalque and the same number behind. Arthur was among the Prince’s household servants, carrying the white stave of office that he would break and throw into Henry’s grave. The coffin, under a black pall and canopy, on which were embroidered the Prince’s many coats of arms, rolled silently over the straw-covered cobbles. On top of it, dressed in the Garter robes of the Prince of Wales, was a wooden effigy with wax face and hands so like the dead Henry that it provoked gasps and crying in its wake. The King, the Queen and Princess Elizabeth were too heartbroken to attend, and so it fell to Prince Charles to lead the mourners, walking behind the bier like a little ghost, still clutching the precious bronze horse. He was accompanied by Frankie’s father, her great-uncle, and Robert Carr. Her husband was several rows behind.