“Driving me mad?” he asks.

I don’t respond.

“Somebody in my court is receiving orders from him,” he says as if the words are wrenched from him. “Somebody is planning to overthrow me and put him in my place.”

“Who?” I whisper. His fears are so powerful that I glance over my shoulder to see that the door behind me is shut tight and step towards him, so that nobody can hear us. “Who is plotting against us in our own court?”

He shakes his head. “One of my men picked up a letter but it had no names.”

“Picked it up?”

“Stole it. I know there are a few men, come together for love of the House of York, hoping to restore the boy. Maybe more than a few. They worked with your mother as their secret leader, they even work with your grandmother. But there are more than these—men who pass daily as friends or comrades or servants of mine. Someone who is as close to me as a brother. I don’t know who to trust—I don’t know who is my true friend.”

I have a sudden chilling sense, Henry’s daily experience, that outside the closed door, beyond the carved panels of thick polished wood, there are people, perhaps hundreds of people, who smile at us as we go into dinner but write secret letters, store up secret weapons, and have a plan to kill us. We have a large busy court, what if a quarter of them are against us? What if half of them are against us? What if they turn against my boys? What if they are poisoning my little daughter? What if they turn against me?

“We have enemies in the very heart of this very court,” he whispers. “They may be the ones who turn down our beds, they may be the ones who serve our food. They may be the ones who taste our food and assure us that it is safe to eat. Or they may ride alongside us, play cards with us, dance holding your hand, see us to bed at night. We may call them cousin, we may call them dearest. I don’t know who to trust.”

I don’t promise him my loyalty, since there is no comfort to be had in words anymore. My name and my house are his enemies, my affinity may be massing against him; mere words will not overcome that. “You do have people you can trust,” I assure him. I list them for him, as if I am singing hymns against darkness. “Your mother, your uncle, the Earl of Oxford, your stepfather and all his kin, the Stanleys, the Courtenays, my half brother Thomas Grey—all the people who stood by you at Stoke will stand by you again.”

He shakes his head. “No, because they weren’t all beside me at Stoke. Some of them found an excuse to stay away. Some of them said they would come but delayed and were not there in time. Some of them promised their love and loyalty but flatly refused to come. Some of them pretended to illness, or could not leave their homes. Some were even there, but on the other side, and begged for my forgiveness afterwards. And anyway, even of those who were there—they won’t stand by me again, not again and again. They won’t stand by me against a boy under the white rose, not one who they believe is a true prince.”