“You should have told me you wanted to go and I would have sent you more comfortably on the barge,” Henry says shortly.

“I am sorry. I thought you would not want me to visit.”

“And so you thought you would get out and back without my knowing?”

I nod. There is no point denying it. Obviously I had hoped that he would not know. “Because you don’t trust me,” he says flatly. “Because you don’t think that I would let you visit her, if it was safe for you to do so. You prefer to deceive me and creep out like a spy to meet my enemy in secret.”

I say nothing. He tucks my hand into the crook of his elbow as if we were a loving husband and wife, and he makes me walk, stride by stride, with him.

“And did you find your mother comfortably housed? And well?”

I nod. “Yes. I thank you.”

“And did she tell you what she has been doing?”

“No.” I hesitate. “She tells me nothing. I told her that we were going to Norwich, I hope that wasn’t wrong?”

For a moment his hard gaze at me is softened, as if he is sorry for the tearing apart of my loyalties; but then he speaks bitterly. “No. It doesn’t matter. She will have other spies set around me as well as you. She probably knew already. What did she ask you?”

It is like a nightmare, reviewing my conversation with my mother and wondering what will incriminate her, or even incriminate me. “Almost nothing,” I answer. “She asked me if John de la Pole had left court, and I said yes.”

“Did she hazard a guess as to why he had gone? Did she know where he had gone?”

I shake my head. “I told her that it was thought that he has gone to Flanders,” I confess.

“Did she not know already?”

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Was he expected?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will his family follow him, do you think? His brother Edmund? His mother, Elizabeth, your aunt? His father? Are they all faithless, though I have trusted them and taken them into my court and listened to their counsels? Will they just take note of everything I said and take it to their kinsmen, my enemies?”

I shake my head again. “I don’t know.”

He releases my hand to step back and look at me, his dark eyes unsmiling and suspicious, his face hard. “When I think of the fortune that was spent on your education, Elizabeth, I am really amazed at how little you know.”

ST. MARY’S IN THE FIELDS, NORWICH, SUMMER 1487

The court travels east on muddy roads and we celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi at Norwich, and we stay at the chapel of the college of St. Mary’s in the Fields and go into the wealthy town to observe the procession of the guilds to the cathedral.