After our mother’s death, our parents’ marriage became known and our father had been imprisoned for contravening the Marriage Act. Edmund and I had found refuge with the nuns at Barking Abbey on the Thames outside London, living among a group of young royal wards being educated there. Only when our half-brother, King Henry, reached his majority was our father released and we were brought into Henry’s own household, where tutors and instructors were engaged to prepare us for knighthood, a process which was now approaching its conclusion. It had been a change of lifestyle much appreciated by both of us.

Mette’s rheumy eyes crinkled. ‘Ha! I can imagine. And damsels? Does the queen keep a charm of goldfinches in her solar to delight the young men at court?’

‘She does, but none outshines her. It must be owned that Queen Marguerite is dramatically beautiful. They say that her dark eyes and skin are inherited from her Spanish grandmother.’

Mette sniffed and leaned forward to speak in a confidential whisper. ‘And that does not endear her to the English, especially as she has not yet produced an heir to the throne. As your mother knew only too well, in a queen beauty is no substitute for fertility. Besides Queen Marguerite is actually French, whom the English dislike even more than the Spanish, or the Welsh for that matter.’

‘Which is the very reason I am careful to avoid revealing my doubly unpopular origins.’ I shot her a wry look. ‘You are French, Mette. Have you found the English much prejudiced against you?’

Her smile was reassuring and rather nostalgic. ‘No, but I live very quietly now. Your lady mother did though – very much so; but then if she had not she would never have married Owen Tudor and retired into obscurity – and you would not have been born.’

‘Did I hear my name? Are you gossiping about me, Madame Mette?’ My father had approached the hearth and with his usual gallantry removed his rakishly feathered hat, bowed over Mette’s hand and kissed it.

She responded with a broad smile and a raised eyebrow. ‘From what I hear you do not need me to spread gossip about you, Master Tudor.’

My father looked affronted. ‘Now what are they saying in the city? None of it will be true of course.’

I pricked up my ears. Unless invited to attend the king, our father wisely avoided the royal palace these days, but when he was in London I often met him in one of the taverns clustered around Westminster Hall, where the courts of justice sat. Any rumour Mette had picked up would have come through her lawyer son William.

She gave Owen a stern look. ‘They say you are making the most of your new appointment as King’s Forester in North Wales; working your way through the poor widows of Denbighshire.’