She looks at me as if she would tell me the truth if she could. “How would I know?” she asks. “How do I know who is claiming to be a prince of York? In Lisbon, so far away? I’ll know him when I see him, I can tell you that. I will tell you when I see him, I can promise you that. But perhaps I’ll never see him.”

THE TOWER OF LONDON, SPRING 1487

We move the court to the City that is buzzing like a beehive waking to spring. It feels as if everyone is talking about princes and dukes and the House of York rising up again like a climbing plant bursting into leaf. Everyone has heard for certain from someone that the Yorks have a boy, an heir, that he is on a ship coming into Greenwich, that he has been hiding in a secret chamber in the Tower under a stone stair, that he is marching from Scotland, that he is going to be put on the throne by his own brother-in-law, Henry, that his sister the queen has him at court and is only waiting to reveal him to her astounded husband. That he is a page boy with an Englishman in Portugal, a boatman’s son in Flanders, hidden by his aunt the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, asleep on a distant island, living off apples in the loft of his mother’s old house at Grafton, hidden in the Tower with his cousin Edward of Warwick. Suddenly, like butterflies in springtime, there are a thousand pretend boys, dancing about like motes in the sunlight, waiting for the word to come together into an army. The Tudors who thought they had taken the crown on a muddy field in the middle of England, who thought they had secured their line by trudging up the road to London, find themselves besieged by will-o’-the-wisps, defied by faeries. Everyone talks of a York heir, everyone knows someone who has seen him and swears it is true. Everywhere Henry goes, people fall silent so that no whisper reaches his ears; but before and behind him there is a patter of sound like a warning drizzle before a storm of rain. The people of England are waiting for a new king to present himself, for a prince to rise like the spring tide and flood the world with white roses.

We move to the Tower as if Henry no longer loves his country palace in springtime, as he swore that he did, only last year. This year, he feels the need of a castle that is easily defended, as if he wants his home to dominate the skyline, as if he wants to be in the heart of the city, unmistakably its lord; though everyone talks of another, from the drovers coming into Smithfield discussing a priceless white ram glimpsed on a dawn hillside, to the fisherwomen on the quay, who swear that one dark night, two years ago, they saw the watergate of the Tower slide up in silence and a little wherry come out under the dripping gate which carried a boy, a single boy, the flower of York, and it went swiftly downstream to freedom.