“But could it be both?” I ask. “Both a sickness and a sign?”

“Without doubt it is both,” she says. “They are saying that a king whose reign starts with sweat will have to labor to keep his throne. Henry’s sickness is killing his friends and supporters as if the disease were a weapon against him and them. He is losing more allies now in his triumph than ever died on the battlefield. It would be funny if it weren’t so bitter.”

“What does it mean for us?” I ask.

She looks upstream, as if the very water of the river might float an answer to my dangling feet. “I don’t know yet,” she says thoughtfully. “I can’t tell. But if he were to take the sickness himself and die, then people would be sure to say it was the judgment of God on a usurper, and would look for a York heir to the throne.”

“And do we have one?” I ask, my voice barely audible above the lapping of the water. “A York heir?”

“Of course we do: Edward of Warwick.”

I hesitate. “Do we have another? Even closer?”

Still looking away from me she nods, imperceptibly.

“My little brother Richard?”

Again she nods, as if she does not even trust the wind with her words.

I gasp. “You have him safe, Mother? You’re sure of it? He’s alive? In England?”

She shakes her head. “I have had no news. I can say nothing for certain, and certainly nothing to you. We have to pray for the two sons of York, Prince Edward and Prince Richard, as lost boys, until someone can tell us what has become of them.” She smiles at me. “And better that I don’t tell you what I hope,” she says gently. “But who knows what the future will bring if Henry Tudor dies?”

“Can’t you wish it on him?” I whisper. “Let him die of the illness that he has brought in with him?”

She turns her head away, as if to listen to the river. “If he killed my son, then my curse is already on him,” she says flatly. “You cursed the murderer of our boys with me, remember? We asked Melusina, the goddess-ancestor of my mother’s family, to take revenge for us. D’you remember what we said?”

“Not the exact words. I remember that night.”

It was the night when my mother and I were distraught with grief and fear, imprisoned in sanctuary as my uncle Richard came and told her that both her sons, Edward and Richard, my beloved little brothers, had disappeared from their rooms in the Tower. That was the night that my mother and I wrote a curse on a piece of paper, folded it into a paper boat, lit it, and watched it flare as it floated downriver. “I don’t remember exactly what we said.”

She knows it word for word, the worst curse she has ever laid on anyone; she has it by heart. “We said: ‘Know this: that there is no justice to be had for the wrong that someone has done to us, so we come to you, our Lady Mother, and we put into your dark depths this curse: that whoever took our firstborn son from us, that you take his firstborn son from him.’ ”