“What plans?” Cecily demands.

“I’ll tell you later, when I know more myself,” my mother says to Cecily, and to me she remarks, “She’s to be served on bended knee, she is to be called ‘Your Grace,’ she’s to receive a royal bow.”

I make a little face of disdain. “We didn’t part the best of friends, she and I.”

“When you’re married and you are queen, she will curtsey to you, whatever name she goes by,” my mother says simply. “It doesn’t matter if she likes you or not, you’re still going to marry her son.” She turns to the younger children. “Now, I’ll show you all your rooms.”

“Aren’t we in our usual rooms?” I ask thoughtlessly.

My mother’s smile is slightly strained. “Of course we’re not in the royal rooms anymore. Lady Margaret Stanley has reserved the queen’s rooms as her own. And her husband’s family, the Stanleys, have all the best apartments. We are in the second-best rooms. You are in Lady Margaret’s old room. It seems that she and I have swapped places.”

“Lady Margaret Stanley is to have the queen’s rooms?” I ask. “Didn’t she think that I would have them?”

“Not yet, at any rate,” my mother says. “Not until the day that you marry and are crowned. Until then she is the first lady of Henry’s court, and she is anxious that everyone knows it. Apparently, she has ordered everyone to call her My Lady the King’s Mother.”

“My Lady the King’s Mother?” I repeat the strange title.

“Yes,” my mother says with a wry smile. “Not bad for a woman who was my lady-in-waiting, and who has spent the last year estranged from her husband and under house arrest for treason, don’t you think?”

We move into the second-best rooms in Westminster Palace and wait for King Henry to command our presence. He does not. He holds his court at the palace of the Bishop of London, near St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City, and every man who can pretend that he is of the House of Lancaster, or a longtime secret supporter of the Tudor cause, flocks to see him and claims a reward for his loyalty. We wait for an invitation to be presented at court, but none comes.

My mother orders new dresses for me, headdresses to make me look yet taller, new slippers to peep below the hem of the new gowns, and praises my looks. I am fair like she was, with gray eyes. She was the famously beautiful daughter of the best-looking couple in the kingdom and she says with quiet satisfaction that I have inherited the family looks.

She seems serene; but people are beginning to talk. Cecily says that we may be in the royal palace again, but it is as lonely and as quiet as being mewed up in sanctuary. I don’t bother to disagree with her, but she’s wrong. She’s so very wrong. She can’t remember sanctuary as I can; there is nothing, nothing worse than the darkness and the quiet, and knowing that you can’t get out, and fearing that anyone can come in. Last time we were in sanctuary, we could not get out for nine months; it felt like nine years, and I thought I would fade and die without sunlight. Cecily says that she, as a married woman, should not even be with us, but she should be released to rejoin her husband.