Someone pins a ballad on my saddle when I am about to ride. I scan the lines; it is predicting the sun of York shining on England again and everyone being happy. At once I rip it from the pommel and take it to the king, leaving my horse waiting in the stable yard.

“I thought you should see this. What does it mean?” I ask Henry.

“It means that there are people who are prepared to print treason as well as tell lies,” he says grimly. He twitches it out of my hand. “It means there are people wasting their time setting treason to music.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Find the man that printed it and slit his ears,” he says bleakly. “Cut out his tongue. What are you going to do?”

I shrug as if I am quite indifferent to the poet who sang of the House of York, or the printer who published his poem. “Shall I go riding?” I ask him.

“You don’t care about this—” he gestures to the ballad in his hand “—this dross?”

I shake my head, my eyes wide. “No. Why should I? Does it matter at all?”

He smiles. “Not to you, it seems.”

I turn away. “People will always talk nonsense,” I say indifferently.

He catches my hand and kisses it. “You were right to bring it to me,” he says. “Always tell me whatever nonsense you hear, however unimportant it seems to you.”

“Of course,” I say.

He walks with me to the stable yard. “At least it reassures me about you.”

Then my own maid whispers to me that there was a great stir in the meat market of Smithfield when someone said that Edward, my little cousin Teddy, was escaped from the Tower and was planting his standard in Warwick Castle, and the House of York was rallying to his cause.

“Half the butcher apprentices said they should take their meat cleavers and march to serve him,” she says. “The others said they should march on the Tower and free him.”

I dare not even ask Henry about this, his face is so grim. We are all trapped inside the palace by the icy winds and sleet and snow that fall every day. Henry rides out on frozen roads in a quiet fury, while his mother spends all her time on her knees on the cold stone floors of the chapel. Every day brings more and more stories of stars that have been seen to dance in the cold skies, prophesying a white rose. Someone sees a white rose made from the frost on the grass at Bosworth at dawn. There are poems nailed to the door of Westminster Abbey. A gang of wherry boys sings carols under the windows of the Tower, and Edward of Warwick swings open his window and waves to them, and calls out “Merry Christmas!” The king and his mother walk stiffly as if they are frozen with horror.