“My Lady the King’s Mother is ill with fear,” I point out to her. “She thinks the English springtime is a benighted desert. Her son is all but dumb. They trust no one but their own circle and every day there are more rumors in the outside world. It’s coming, isn’t it? A new rebellion? You know the plans and you know who will lead them.” I pause and lower my voice to a whisper. “He’s on the way, isn’t he?”

My mother says nothing for a moment but walks beside me in silence, graceful as ever. She pauses and turns to me, takes a daffodil bud, and tucks it gently into my hat. “Do you think I have said nothing to you ever since your marriage about these matters because it slipped my mind?” she asks quietly.

“No, of course not.”

“Because I thought you had no interest?”

I shake my head.

“Elizabeth, on your wedding day you promised to love, honor, and obey the king. On the day of your coronation you will have to promise, before God in the most solemn and binding of vows, to be his loyal subject, the first of his loyal subjects. You will take the crown on your head, you will take the holy oil on your breast. You cannot be forsworn then. You cannot know anything that you would have to keep from him. You cannot have secrets from him.”

“He doesn’t trust me!” I burst out. “Without you ever telling me a word he already suspects me of knowing a whole conspiracy and keeping it secret. Over and over again he asks me what I know, over and over again he warns me that he is making allowances for us. His mother is certain that I am a traitor to him, and I believe that he thinks so too.”

“He will come to trust you, perhaps,” she says. “If you have years together. You may grow to be a loving husband and wife, if you have long enough. And if I never tell you anything, then there will never be a moment where you have to lie to him. Or worse—never a moment when you have to choose where your loyalties lie. I wouldn’t want you to have to choose between your father’s family and your husband’s. I wouldn’t want you to have to choose between the claims of your little son and another.”

I am horrified at the thought of having to choose between Tudor and York. “But if I know nothing, then I am like a leaf on the water, I go wherever the current takes me. I don’t act, I do nothing.”

She smiles. “Yes. Why don’t you let the river take you? And we’ll see what she says.”

We turn in silence and head back along the riverbank to Sheen, the beautiful palace of many towers which dominates the curve of the river. As we walk towards the palace I see half a dozen horses gallop up to the king’s private door. The men dismount, and one pulls off his hat and goes inside.