“Anyone think he looks familiar?” Henry’s hard gaze rakes my family, my sisters with their heads down as if they are guilty, my cousin Maggie with her eyes on the little boy who looks so like her brother, my half brother Thomas who is gazing around indifferently, determined that no one shall see him flinch.

“No,” I say shortly. He is slight like my brother Richard and has cropped blond hair like his. I can’t see his face but I caught a glimpse of hazel eyes like my brother’s, and at the back of his head there are a few childish curls on the nape of the neck, just like Richard’s. When he used to sit at my mother’s feet, she would twist his curls around her fingers as if they were bright golden rings, and she would read to him until he was sleepy and ready for bed. The sight of the little boy, on his knees, makes me think once more of my brother Richard, and of the page that we sent into the Tower to take his place, of my missing brother Prince Edward, and of my cousin Edward of Warwick—Maggie’s brother—in the Tower alone. It is as if there is a succession of boys, York boys, all bright, all charming, all filled with promise; but nobody can be sure where they are tonight, or even if they are alive or dead, or if they are unreal, flights of fancy and pretenders like this one.

“Does he not remind you of your cousin Edward of Warwick?” Henry asks me, speaking clearly so that the whole court can hear.

“No, not at all.”

“Would you ever have mistaken him for your dead brother Richard?”

“No.”

He turns from me, now that this masque has been played out and everyone can say that the boy knelt before us and I looked at him and denied him. “So anyone who thought that he was a son of York was either deceived or a deceiver,” Henry rules. “Either a fool or a liar.”

He waits for everyone to understand that John de la Pole, Francis Lovell, and my own mother were fools and liars, and then he goes on: “So, boy, you are not who you said you were. My wife, a princess of York, does not recognize you. She would say if you were her kinsman as you claim. But she says you are not. So who are you?”

For a moment I think the child is so afraid that he has lost the power of speech. But then, keeping his head down and his eyes on the ground, he whispers: “John Lambert Simnel, if it please Your Grace. Sorry,” he adds awkwardly.

“John Lambert Simnel.” Henry rolls the name around his tongue like a bullying schoolmaster. “John. Lambert. Simnel. And how ever have you got from your nursery, John, to here? For it has been a long journey for you, and a costly and time-consuming trouble for me.”

“I know, Sire. I’m very sorry, Sire,” the child says.