‘Yes, the traditional Bride Ale, strongly brewed and flavoured with herbs and honey, for all the guests to drink their health.’

Edmund grimaced and flicked back his glossy hair. ‘Oh well, I daresay there will be wine as well. After all, their name is Vintner. There are plenty of wine merchants in the family.’

* * *

Meg and William Vintner were married at St Mildred’s church in the London ward known as the Vintry, the same church that had witnessed the nuptials of his parents more than twenty years before. As the bride and groom stood in the porch making their vows, I studied the face of the woman who had brought them both up. Mistress Guillaumette Vintner, known to close friends and family as Mette, was now a matron of sixty-three years, stout and wrinkled in her wimple and veil to which, on formal occasions such as this, she added a widow’s barbe to mark her lone status since the death of her husband Geoffrey several years before. They had enjoyed seventeen happy years of marriage before he had succumbed to congestion of the lungs and once or twice I saw her gaze wander wistfully off towards the churchyard where he lay buried. The bridegroom, their only son William, had been what she called their ‘autumn leaf’, the last fruit of their fertility before the sap began its winter retreat, and no one could have been more delighted than Mette when the relationship between William and Meg changed from the affection of siblings to the attraction of adults. Probably Geoffrey had foreseen their future together too before he died. Somehow it seemed inevitable. Meg had been Queen Catherine’s secret bequest to the woman who had been her wet nurse as a babe and whom she had come to regard as a true mother.

Owen Tudor stood beside Mette. Father to Edmund, Meg and me and still handsome, with his silver hair and ruddy complexion, he had travelled from the Welsh March for the occasion. I knew he still practised regularly with sword and bow, which kept his physique that of a man ten years younger than the fifty he had lived and I admired him for it. Nor did he appear to have lost any of his ability to charm the ladies; more than once he caused Mette to blush and smile at his whispered comments as the short ceremony progressed. He also aimed a sly wink at Edmund and me, which I returned but which made Edmund hiss through his teeth. I think my brother would rather it had been our mother, Queen Catherine, who survived to attend the wedding, instead of the Welsh squire she had married in secret and to whom she had borne four children. Edmund was the eldest. Our younger brother Owen, the child born shortly before our mother passed away, was now a monk at Westminster Abbey and had taken another name.