“Not this time,” he says. “Perhaps something worse than the duchess . . . if you can imagine anything worse than her.”

I wait.

“Has your mother said anything to you?” he asks. “This is important, Elizabeth. You must tell me if she has said anything.”

“No, nothing,” I say. My conscience is clear. She did not come into confinement with me this time, she said she was unwell and feared bringing illness into the room with her. At the time I was disappointed, but now I have a clutch of apprehension that she stayed outside to weave treasonous plots. “I have not seen her. She has written nothing to me. She is ill.”

“She’s said nothing to your sisters?” he asks. He tips his head to where Maggie sits beside the wet nurse, petting my son’s little feet as he sleeps. “She’s said nothing? Your cousin of Warwick? Margaret? Nothing about her brother?”

“She asks me if he can be released,” I remark. “And I ask it of you, of course. He is doing nothing wrong—”

“He’s doing nothing wrong in the Tower because he is powerless to do anything as my prisoner,” Henry says abruptly. “If he were free, God knows where he would turn up. Ireland, I suppose.”

“Why Ireland?”

“Because Charles of France has put an invasion force into Ireland.” He speaks in a suppressed angry mutter. “Half a dozen ships, a couple of hundred men wearing the cross of St. George as if they were an English army. He has armed and fitted out an army marching under the flag of St. George! A French army in Ireland! Why d’you think he would do that?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I find I am whispering like him, as if we are conspirators, planning to overthrow a country, as if it is we who have no rights, who should not be here.

“D’you think he is expecting something?”

I shake my head. Truly, I am baffled. “Henry, really, I don’t know. What would the King of France be expecting to come out of Ireland?”

“A new ghost?”

I feel a shiver crawl slowly down my spine like a cold wind, though it is a summer day, and I gather my shawl around my shoulders. “What ghost?”

At that single potent word, I have lowered my voice like him, and the two of us sound as if we are calling up spirits as he leans towards me and says, “There’s a boy.”

“A boy?”

“Another boy. A boy who is trying to pass himself off as your dead brother.”

“Edward?”

“Richard.”

My old pain, at the name of the man I loved, given to the brother that I lost, taps on my heart like a familiar friend. I tighten my shawl again and find that I am hugging myself, as if for comfort.

“A boy pretending to be Richard? Who is he? Another false boy, another imposter?”

“I can’t trace this one,” Henry says, his eyes dark with fear. “I can’t find who’s backing him, I can’t discover where he comes from. They say he speaks several languages, carries himself like a prince. They say he is convincing—well, Simnel was a convincing child, that’s what they’re trained up to be.”