Henry comes to my rooms only once during this anxious time, with a letter in his hand. “I will tell you this myself so that you don’t hear it from a York traitor,” he says unpleasantly.

I rise to my feet and my ladies melt away from my husband’s temper. They have learned, we have all learned, to keep out of the way of the Tudors, mother and son, when they are pale with fear. “Your Grace?” I say steadily.

“The King of France has chosen this moment, this very moment, to release your brother Thomas Grey.”

“Thomas!”

“He writes that he will come to support me,” Henry says bitterly. “You know, I don’t think we’ll risk that. When Thomas was last supporting me on the road to Bosworth, he changed his mind and turned his coat before we even left France. Who knows what he would have done on the battlefield? But they’re releasing him now. Just in time for another battle. What d’you think I should do?”

I hold on to the back of a chair so that my hands don’t tremble. “If he gives you his word . . .” I begin.

He laughs at me. “His word!” he says scathingly. “The York word! Would that be as binding as your mother’s word of honor? Or your cousin John’s? Your marriage vows?”

I start to stammer a reply but he puts up his hand for silence. “I’ll hold him in the Tower. I don’t want his help, and I don’t trust him free. I don’t want him talking to his mother, and I don’t want him seeing you.”

“He could . . .”

“No, he couldn’t.”

I take a breath. “May I at least write and tell my mother that her son, my half brother, is coming home?”

He laughs, a jeering unconvincing laugh. “D’you think she won’t know already? D’you think she has not paid his ransom and commanded his return?”

I write to my mother at Bermondsey Abbey. I leave the letter unsealed for I know that Henry or his mother or his spies will open it and read it anyway.

My dear Lady Mother,

I greet you well.

I write to tell you that your son Thomas Grey has been released from France and has offered his service to the king, who has decided, in his wisdom, to hold my half brother in safekeeping in the Tower of London for the time being.

I am in good health, as is your grandson.

Elizabeth

P.S. Arthur is crawling everywhere and pulling himself up on chairs so that he can stand. He’s very strong and proud of himself, but he can’t walk yet.

Henry says he must leave me and the ladies of the court, our son Arthur with his own yeomen of the guard in his nursery, and his frantically anxious mother behind the strong walls of Kenilworth Castle, muster his army, and march out. I walk with him to the great entrance gate of the castle, where his army is drawn up in battle array, behind their two great commanders: his uncle Jasper Tudor and his most reliable friend and ally, the Earl of Oxford. Henry looks tall and powerful in his armor, reminding me of my father, who always rode out to battle in the absolute certainty that he would win.