I see her staring at me and I smile at her. At once she flushes scarlet and beams. She whispers to her mother, obviously asking who I am, and her mother very rightly gives her a pinch to make her stand straight and silent, as a girl at court should do.

‘I am giving your daughter in wardship to my dearly loved half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor,’ the king says to the girl’s mother, the dowager duchess. ‘She can live with you, until it is time for her to marry.’

Amusingly, the child looks up as if she has an opinion about this. When no-one so much as glances at her she whispers to her mother again. She is a dear little thing and so anxious to be consulted. It seems hard to me that she will be married off to Edmund Tudor and sent away to Wales.

The queen turns to me and I lean forwards. ‘What do you think?’ Margaret asks.

Margaret Beaufort is of the House of Lancaster, Edmund Tudor is the son of a queen of England. Any child they conceive will have an impressive lineage, English royal blood on one side, French royal blood on the other, both of them kin to the King of England.

‘Is the king making his brother over-mighty?’ the queen whispers.

‘Oh, look at her,’ I say gently. ‘She is a tiny little thing, and a long way from marriageable age. Her mother will keep her home for another ten years, surely. You will have half a dozen babies in the cradle before Edmund Tudor can wed or bed her.’

We both look down the room at the girl whose little head is still bobbing up and down as if she wishes someone would speak to her. The queen laughs. ‘Well, I hope so, surely a little shrimp like that will never make a royal heir.’

* * *

The next night I wait for a quiet moment in the hour before dinner when the queen is dressed and the duke and king have not yet come to our rooms. We are seated before the fire, listening to the musicians. I glance at her for her nod of permission, and then draw my stool a little closer.

‘If you are waiting for a chance to tell me that you are with child again, you need not choose your time,’ she says mischievously. ‘I can see it.’

I blush. ‘I’m certain it will be a boy, I am eating enough to make a man, God knows. I have had to let my belt out.’

‘Have you told Richard?’

‘He guessed, before he left.’

‘I shall ask the duke to let him come home. You will want him at home with you, won’t you?’

I glance at her. Sometimes the almost annual evidence of my reliable fertility makes her wistful; but this time she is smiling, her joy for me is without shadow. ‘Yes. I would want him home, if the duke can spare him.’