“You will be hoping for a boy,” she says.

“Not really.” I open my eyes and meet her gray gaze. “I am hoping that the baby is well and strong. And I would love a little girl. Of course we need a boy . . .”

“Perhaps a girl now, and a boy next,” she suggests. “King Henry is still kind to you? At Christmas he looked like a man in love.”

I nod. “He’s been most tender.”

“And My Lady?”

I make a face. “Most attentive.”

“Ah well, I’m here now,” my mother says, acknowledging that no one can outmatch My Lady the King’s Mother but herself. “Does she come in here for her meals?”

I shake my head. “She dines with her son. When I am in confinement she takes my place at the high table in the court.”

“Let her have her moment of glory,” my mother counsels. “And we’ll eat better in here without her. Who do you have as your ladies-in-waiting?”

“Cecily, Anne, and my cousin Margaret,” I say. “Though Cecily will do nothing for anyone as she is with child herself. And of course I have the king’s kinswomen, and those his mother insists that I keep about me.” I lower my voice. “I am sure that they report to her everything I do and say.”

“Bound to. And how is Maggie? And her poor little brother?”

“She’s allowed to visit him,” I say. “And she says that he is well enough. He has tutors now and a musician. But it’s no life for a boy.”

“Perhaps if Henry gets a second heir he’ll let poor Teddy out,” my mother says. “I pray for that poor boy, every night of his life.”

“Henry can’t let him out while he fears that the people might rise up for a duke of York,” I say. “And even now there are constant uprisings in the country.”

She does not ask me who is rising, or what they are saying. She does not ask me which counties. She goes to the window and draws back a corner of the thick tapestry and looks out as if she has no interest, and from this, I know that Henry is wrong and that my mother has not shot her last bolt of rebellion. On the contrary, she is in the thick of it again. She knows more than I do, she probably knows more than Henry does.

“What’s the point of it?” I ask impatiently. “What’s the point of going on and on causing trouble, while men risk their lives and have to run away to Flanders with a price on their heads? Families are ruined and mothers lose their sons just as you did, women like my aunt Elizabeth, bereft of her son John, her next boy under suspicion. What d’you hope to achieve?”

She turns and her expression is as tender and as steadfast as ever. “I?” she says with her limpid smile. “I achieve nothing. I am just an old grandmother living in Bermondsey Abbey, glad of a chance to visit my darling daughter. I think of nothing but my soul and my next dinner. Causing no trouble at all.”