I stand at his shoulder and look into her face. She is like a little rosebud, like a petal, hands like little starfish and fingernails like the tiniest shells ever washed up by a tide.

“Margaret for my mother,” Henry says, kissing her white-capped little head.

My cousin Maggie steps forwards to take the baby from us. “Margaret for you,” I whisper to her.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1491

Two years pass before we conceive another child, and then at last it is the boy that my husband needed. He greets him with a sort of passion, as if this boy was a fortune. Henry is coming to have a reputation as a king who loves gold in his treasury; this boy is like a new-minted sovereign coin, another Tudor creation.

“We’ll call him Henry,” he declares, as the boy is put into his arms when he visits me, a week after the birth.

“Henry for you?” I ask him, smiling from the bed.

“Henry for the sainted king,” he says sternly, reminding me that just when I think we are most happy and most easy, Henry is still looking over his shoulder, justifying his crown. He looks from me to my cousin Margaret as if we were responsible for the old king’s imprisonment in the Tower and then his death. Margaret and I exchange one guilty look. It was probably our fathers working together with our uncle Richard who held a pillow over the poor innocent king’s sleeping face. At any rate, we are close enough to the murder to feel guilt when Henry calls the old king a saint and names his newborn son for him.

“As you wish,” I say lightly. “But he does look so like you. A copper-head, a proper Tudor.”

He laughs at that. “A redhead, like my uncle Jasper,” he says with pleasure. “Pray God gives him my uncle’s luck.”

He is smiling, but I can see the strain around his eyes, with the look I have come to dread, as if he is a man haunted. This is how he looks when he bursts out in sudden complaints. This is the look that I think he wore for all those years when he was in exile and he could trust no one and feared everybody, and every message that he had from home warned him of my father, and every messenger who brought it could be a murderer.

I nod to Maggie, who is as sensitive as I am to Henry’s uncertain temper, and she takes the baby and gives him to his wet nurse, and then sits beside the two of them, as if she would disappear behind the woman’s warm bulk.

“Is something the matter?” I ask quietly.

He glares at me for a moment, as if I have caused the problem, and then I see him soften, and shake his head. “Odd news,” he says. “Bad news.”

“From Flanders?” I ask quietly. It is always my aunt who causes this deep line between his brows. Year after year she goes on sending spies into England, money to rebels, speaks against Henry and our family, accuses me of disloyalty to our house.