“The boy they said was my cousin Teddy?”

“Yes, because now I can show him. Now everyone can see that he is no heir to York. He’s a schoolboy, a lad of ten years old, name of Lambert Simnel, nothing special about him but his looks . . .” He glances at me. “Handsome, charming, like all the Yorks.”

I nod as if this is a reasonable complaint against us.

“And better than that.” He smiles to himself, he is all but hugging himself with joy. “No one else landed, no one else came. Even though they marched all the way across England, there was no one anchored off the east coast, there was no one waiting for them at Newark.”

“What d’you mean?”

He gets to his feet and stretches himself as if he would spread his arms to hug all of the kingdom. “If they had a pretender, a better likeness than the little schoolboy, they would have had him nearby, waiting. So that when they claimed victory they could produce him, exchange him for the little lad, and take him to London for a second coronation.”

I wait.

“Like with players!” He is almost laughing with joy. “When they make a switch in a play. Like the Easter play—there’s the body in the tomb, someone flicks a cape and there’s the risen Lord. You have to have your switch ready, you have to have your player in the wings. But when they didn’t have a boy waiting to take the place of the Simnel lad—that’s when I knew that they were defeated. They don’t have anyone!” He cracks into a laugh. “See? They don’t have anyone. Nobody was landed to meet them at Newark. Nobody came in from Flanders, nobody sailed up the Thames and arrived in London to wait for the triumphant procession. Nobody arrived in Wales, nobody came down from Scotland. Don’t you see?” He laughs in my face. “All they have is an impersonator, the schoolboy. They don’t have the real thing.”

“The real thing?”

In his relief he speaks his fear clearly for the first time. “They don’t have one of your brothers. They don’t have Edward Prince of Wales, they don’t have Richard Duke of York, his brother and heir. If they had either one of them, they would have had him ready, standing by to take the throne as soon as the battle was won. If either one of your brothers was alive they would have had him, ready to claim the throne, as soon as I was dead. But they don’t! They don’t!

“It’s all been gossip, and rumors, and false sightings and lying reports. They did all this for a bluff. They fooled me—I don’t mind telling you that they frightened me—but it was a May game, a nothing. They made rumors about a boy in Portugal, they whispered about a boy who got out of the Tower alive; but it was all nothing. I have had men hunting all over Christendom for a boy and now I see he is nothing more than a dream. I am content now, that it was all nothing.”