I read the letter. “Did he write this to you?” I put my hand on the cradle, as if I would protect her. “He didn’t write to me?”

“He didn’t write this to me. But God knows, he’s written to everyone but us.”

I can feel my heart thud. “He hasn’t written to us?”

“No,” Henry says, suddenly eager. “That counts against him, doesn’t it? He should have written to you? To your mother? Wouldn’t a lost son, wanting to come home, have written to his mother?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

Carefully neither of us remark that this boy almost certainly wrote to her, and she certainly replied.

“Will anyone have told him that his—” I break off “—that my mother is dead?”

“For sure,” Henry says grimly. “I don’t doubt he has many faithful correspondents from our court.”

“Many?”

He nods. I cannot tell if he is speaking from his darkest fears or from terrible knowledge of traitors who live with us and daily curtsey or bow and yet secretly write to the boy. In any case, the boy should know that my mother is dead, and I am glad that someone has told him.

“No, this is his letter to the Spanish king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella,” Henry goes on. “My men picked it up on the way to them and copied it and sent it on.”

“You didn’t destroy it? To prevent them seeing it?”

He grimaces. “He has sent out so many letters that destroying just one would make no difference. He tells a sad tale. He spins a good yarn. People seem to believe it.”

“People?”

“Charles VIII of France. He’s a boy himself, and all but a madman. But he believes this shadow, this ghost. He’s taken the boy in.”

“In where?”

“Into his court, into France, into his protection.” Henry bites off his answer and looks angrily at me. I gesture to the wet nurse, commanding her to take the baby from the room, as I don’t want our little Princess Elizabeth to hear of danger, I don’t want her to hear the fear in our voices when she should be feeding peacefully.

“I thought you had ships off Ireland to prevent him leaving?”

“I had Pregent Meno offer him a safe voyage. I had ships off Ireland to capture him if he took another vessel. But he saw through the trap of Pregent Meno, and the French sent ships of their own and they smuggled him out.”

“To where?”

“Honfleur—does it make any difference?”

“No,” I say. But it makes a difference to my imagining. It is as if I can see the dark sea, dark as my Elizabeth’s eyes, the swirling mist, the failing light, and the little boats slipping into an unknown Irish port and then the boy—the handsome young boy in his fine clothes—stepping lightly on the gangplank, turning his face into the wind, heading for France with his hopes high. In my imagining, I see his golden hair lift off his young forehead and I see his bright smile: my mother’s indomitable smile.