At the christening feast Edmund Beaufort takes me to one side. ‘Tell the queen that I will call the great council, including the Duke of York, and take the baby prince to visit the king at Windsor.’

I hesitate. ‘But, Your Grace, what if he does not wake at the sight of his child?’

‘Then I will insist that they acknowledge the baby without the king’s recognition.’

‘Could you do that without them seeing him?’ I say. ‘They all know that he is ill but if they see him all but lifeless . . .’

He makes a little grimace. ‘I can’t. Tell the queen I have tried but the council insists that the child is presented to the king. Anything else would look too odd, they would think he is dead and we are concealing it. We have been blessed with a longer time than I dreamed possible. But it has come to an end now. They have to see the king, and the child has to be presented to him. There is nothing we can do to avoid this any longer.’ He hesitates. ‘There is one thing I had better tell you, and you had better forewarn the queen: they are saying that the child is not the true-born son of the king.’

I stiffen, alert to danger. ‘They are?’

He nods. ‘I am doing what I can to quash the rumours. These allegations are treason, of course, and I will see anyone who gossips ends up on the gallows. But with the king hidden away from court, people are bound to talk.’

‘Do they name another man?’ I ask him.

He looks at me, his dark eyes quite without guile. ‘I don’t know,’ he says; though he does know. ‘I don’t think it matters,’ he says; though it does matter. ‘And anyway, there is no evidence.’ This at least is true. Please God there is no evidence of any wrongdoing. ‘But the Duke of York has stirred up the council and so the baby has to be seen and at least held by the king.’

* * *

A council of twelve lords comes to the palace to take the baby upriver to be presented to his father, Somerset at their head. I am to go with them, along with the baby’s nurses and rockers. Anne the Duchess of Buckingham, his godmother, will come too. It is a cold autumn day but the barge is well curtained and the baby is swaddled on his board and then wrapped in furs. The nurse holds him in her lap at the back of the boat, the baby’s rockers seated near her, the wet nurse close by. Two barges follow us: the Duke of Somerset and his friends in one, the Duke of York and his allies in another. It is a fleet of undeclared enmity. I stand in the bow of the boat looking at the water, listening to the soothing swish of the river against the barge and the dip and pull of the oars in the current.