The servants leave us with mulled wine, bread and cheese, nuts and candied fruits, and we have a supper, cozy in our night robes, side by side in our chairs, my feet tucked under me for warmth, his bare feet proffered to the glowing fire. We look like a happy couple in easy companionship. Sometimes I forget myself, and think this is what we are.

“You said good-bye to your uncle?”

“Yes, I did,” I say cautiously. “He said he was going on crusade, and to serve you.”

“Did your mother tell you what he is doing for me?”

I shake my head.

“You’re a discreet family.” Henry smiles. “Anyone would think you had been raised to be spies.”

I shake my head at once. “You know we were not. We were raised as royals.”

“I know. But now that I am a king it sometimes seems to me that it’s the same thing. There’s a rumor reached me that there is some page boy in Portugal pretending to be a bastard son of your father, saying that he should be recognized as a royal duke of England.”

I am watching the flames and I keep facing the fire and only slowly turn to my husband. I meet an intense brown glare. He is watching me closely, and I have a sense of an unexpected interrogation, something keen and unfriendly in the warmth of the evening room. I am aware of my expression, of keeping my face absolutely impassive. I am suddenly aware of everything. “Oh, really? Who is he?”

“Of course your father had more bastards than anyone could count,” he says carelessly. “I suppose we should expect to find one or two every year.”

“Yes he did,” I say. “And I hope that God forgives him, for my mother never did.”

He laughs at that, but it only diverts him for a moment. “Did she not? How did he dare to defy her?”

I smile. “He would laugh at her and kiss her and buy her earrings. And besides, she was almost always with child, and he was king. Who could say no to him?”

“It’s inconvenient. It leaves a scattering of bastard half brothers and sisters,” Henry points out. “More Yorks than any man needs.”

“Especially if he’s not York himself,” I observe. “But we know most of them. Grace, in my mother’s service, is one of my father’s bastard daughters. She could not love Mother more if she were her own daughter, and we treat her as a half sister. She is absolutely loyal to you.”

“Well, this lad is claiming royal blood like her, but I don’t expect to bring him to court. I thought your uncle might go and take a look at him. Speak to his master, say that we don’t want the embarrassment of a bastard twig making much of himself, another little shoot on the Plantagenet vine. Tell him that we don’t need a new royal duke, that we have Yorks enough. Quietly remind him who is king now in England. Point out that connections to the earlier king are no advantage, not to the page boy nor to his master.”