The king’s servants greet us at the gate of the palace at Westminster and lead us through a maze of courts and gardens, rooms with inner rooms, galleries and courtyards, until finally we come to the king’s private rooms. One pair of double doors is flung open, another pair beyond them, then there is a room filled with people in the most beautiful clothes, and finally, like a tiny jack popping from a series of boxes, there is the young king, rising from his throne and coming forwards to greet his uncle.

He is slight and short – that is my first impression – and he is pale, pale like a scholar, though I know that they make him take exercise, ride daily, and even joust with a safety cushion on the top of his opponent’s lance. I wonder if he is ill, for there is something about the transparency of his skin and the slow pace of his walk towards us that gives me a feeling of his weariness, and suddenly, I see to my horror that in this light, for a moment, he looks to me like a being made of glass, so thin and translucent that he looks as if he might break if he were to topple on a stone floor.

I give a little gasp and my husband glances down at me, distracted for a moment, and turns to the king his nephew and bows and embraces him in one movement. ‘Oh! Take care!’ I whisper as if he might crush him, and then Woodville steps smartly across and takes my right hand on his arm, as if he is bringing me forwards to be presented.

‘What is it?’ he demands urgently in a low whisper. ‘Are you ill, my lady?’

My husband has both hands on the boy’s shoulders, he is looking into the pale face, into the light-grey eyes. I can almost feel the weight of his grip, I feel that it is too much. ‘He’s so frail,’ I whisper, then I find the true word: ‘He is fragile, like a prince of ice, of glass.’

‘Not now!’ Woodville commands, and pinches my hand hard. I am so surprised at his tone and the sudden sharp pain that I flinch and look at him, and am returned to myself to see that the men and women of the court are all around us, staring at me and my lord and the king, and that Woodville is marching me forwards to make my curtsey, with such determined briskness that I know I must not say another word.

I sink down into a deep curtsey and the king raises me up with a light touch on my arms. He is respectful since I am his aunt, for all that I am only seventeen years old to his twelve: we are both young innocents in this court of hard-faced adults. He bids me welcome to England in a thin little voice that has not yet broken into a man’s tone. He kisses my cheeks right and left; the touch of his lips is cold, like the brittle ice that I imagined when I first saw him, and his hands holding mine are thin, I can almost feel the bones of his fingers, like little icicles.