“But he’s gone? Run away?” I can’t help it; whoever he is, I hope that the boy has got away.

“I said so, didn’t I?”

I wait for a few moments as his ill-tempered snarl dies away and then I try again. “Gone where?”

“If I knew that, I would send someone to kill him on the road,” my husband says bitterly. “Drown him in the sea, drop a tree on his head, lame his horse, and cut him down. He could have gone anywhere, couldn’t he? He’s quite the little adventurer. Back to Portugal? They believe he is Richard there, they refer to him as your father’s son, the Duke of York. To Spain? He has written to the king and queen as an equal and they have not contradicted him. To Scotland? If he goes to the King of Scots and together they raise an army and come against me, then I am a dead man in the North of England; I don’t have a single friend in those damned bleak hills. I know the Northerners; they are just waiting for him to lead them before they rise against me.

“Or has he gone back to Ireland to rouse the Irish against me again? Or has he gone to your aunt, your aunt Margaret in Flanders? Will she greet her nephew with joy and set him up against me, d’you think? She sent a whole army for a kitchen boy, what will she do for the real thing? Will she give him a couple of thousand mercenaries and send him to Stoke to finish off the job that her first pretender started?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

He leaps to his feet and his chair crashes back on the floor. “You never know!” he yells in my face, spittle flying from his mouth, beside himself with anger. “You never know! It’s your motto! Never mind ‘humble and penitent,’ your motto is ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! I never know!’ Whatever I ask you, you always never know!”

The door behind me opens a crack, and my cousin Maggie puts her fair head into the room. “Your Grace?”

“Get out!” he yells at her. “You York bitch! All of you York traitors. Get out of my sight before I put you in the Tower along with your brother!”

She flinches back from his rage but she will not leave me to his anger. “Is everything all right, Your Grace?” she asks me, forcing herself to ignore him. I see she is clinging to the door to hold herself up, her knees weak with fear, but she looks past my furious husband to see if I need her help. I look at her white face and know that I must look far worse, ashen with shock.

“Yes, Lady Pole,” I say. “I am quite all right. There is nothing for you to do here. You can leave us. I am quite all right.”

“Don’t bother on my account, I’m going!” Henry corrects me. “I’m damned if I’ll spend the night here. Why would I?” He rushes to the door and jerks it away from Maggie, who staggers for a moment but still holds her ground, visibly trembling. “I’m going to my own rooms,” he says. “The best rooms. There’s no comfort for me here, in this York nest, in this foul traitors’ nest.”