“Signs?”

“Of a discontented people.”

“Henry Percy?” I repeat. “How was his death a sign? I thought people were objecting to paying tax?”

The king’s face is grim. “The people of the North never forgave him for failing Richard at Bosworth,” he says, watching me. “So I daresay you too think it serves him right.”

I don’t reply to this, it is still too raw for me. Henry Percy told Richard that his troops were too tired to fight, having marched from the North—as if a commander brings troops to a battle who are too tired to fight! He put himself at the rear of Richard’s army and never moved forwards. When Richard charged off the hill to his death, Percy watched him go without stirring himself. I won’t grieve for him in his dirty little death. He’s no loss to me. “But none of this has anything to do with my mother,” I hazard.

Uncle Jasper gives me a long, cool look from his blue eyes as if he disagrees.

“Not directly,” Henry concedes. “She shot her last bolt with the kitchen boy’s rebellion. I’ve got nothing that identifies her with these scattered troubles.”

“So she could come into confinement with me.”

“Very well,” he decides. “She’s as safe inside with you as she is inside the abbey. And it shows that she is a member of our family, to anyone who still dreams that she represents York.”

“May I write to her today?”

He nods, takes my hand, and kisses it. “I can refuse you nothing,” he says. “Not when you are about to give me another son.”

“What if it’s a girl?” I ask, smiling at him. “Will you send me a bill for all these favors if I have a girl?”

He shakes his head. “It’s a boy. I am certain of it.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1489

My mother promises to come from Bermondsey but there is so much illness in London that she will not come into confinement with me straightaway but waits in her rooms for a few days to make sure that she is not carrying the pox, which comes with a painfully hot fever and terrible red spots all over the body.

“I wouldn’t bring it in on you,” she says when she finally comes in through the door, padded for silence, which opens so rarely on the outside world.

In a moment I am in her arms and she is hugging me and then stepping back to look at my face, and my big belly, and my swollen hands.

“You’ve taken all your rings off,” she remarks.

“They were too tight,” I say. “And my ankles are as fat as my calves.”

She laughs at that. “That will all be better when the baby comes,” she says, and presses me down to the day bed, sits at the end of it, takes my feet into her lap, and rubs them firmly with her strong hands. She strokes the soles, pulling gently at the toes until I almost purr with pleasure and she laughs at me again.