“Thank you,” I say quietly, and then I leave him at the grille and go into the confinement chamber and sit down. I know that he will be thinking her death makes him safer; he cannot help but be glad that she has died. Even as he puts on mourning his heart will be singing with relief. Alive, my mother was a figurehead for the York rebels, and any endorsement from her of a pretend boy would make him as good as a real prince. Her recognition of any pretender as her son would invalidate Henry’s claim to the throne. She could always have destroyed his claim with one word. He could never be sure that she would not say that word. Her death is the best thing that could have happened for Henry and his hard-hearted mother.

But not for me.

As I wait in the quiet confinement room for my baby to come, I cannot imagine what my life will be without her. I understand that her death is the best thing that could have happened for Henry.

But not for me.

I have to give birth without her, knowing that she is not even in this world thinking of me. I try to comfort myself with the knowledge that wherever she is, she will be thinking of me; I try to comfort myself with the memory of the other births when she was with me, when she held my hands and whispered to me so soothingly that it was almost as if the pains floated away on her words; but I am aware all the time that my mother has gone and these pains, and all the other trials of my life, even the triumphs, will come to me without her, and I shall have to bear them without her to comfort me.

And when the baby is born, after long hours of hard struggle, it grieves me all over again that my mother will never see her. She is such a beautiful baby, with dark, dark blue eyes and beautifully fair hair. But she will never be held by my mother, or rocked by her. She will never hear my mother sing. When they take her away to be washed and swaddled, I feel terribly bereft.

They hold my mother’s funeral without me, while I am still confined, and read her will. They bury her, as she asked, beside the man she adored, her husband King Edward IV. She leaves nothing—my husband Henry paid her so small a pension, and she paid it out so readily, that she died as a poor woman, asking me and my half brother Thomas Grey to settle her debts and to pay for Masses to be said for her soul. She had none of the fortune that my father heaped on her, no treasures of England, not even personal jewels. The people who called her acquisitive, and said that she amassed a fortune with her wiles, should have seen her modest room and her empty wardrobe chests. When they brought her little box of papers and books to my confinement rooms I could not help but smile. Everything she had owned as Queen of England had been sold to finance the rebellions, first against Richard, and then against Henry. The empty jewelry box tells its own story of an unremitting battle to restore the House of York, and I am very sure that the missing boy is indeed wearing a silk shirt that was bought by my mother, and the pearls on the gold brooch in his hat are her gift too.