So I am not surprised that Henry does not die, though the sickness he has brought to England takes first one Lord Mayor of London, and then his hastily elected successor, and then six aldermen die too, almost in the same month. They say that every home in the city has suffered a death, and the carts for the dead rattle down the streets every night, just as if it were a plague year, and a bad one at that.

When the illness dies out with the cold weather, Jennie my maid does not come back to work when I send for her, for she is dead too; her whole household took the sweat and died of it between Prime and Compline. No one has known such quick deaths before, and they whisper everywhere against the new king whose reign has started with a procession of death carts. It is not till the end of October that Henry decides that it is safe to call the lords and gentry of the realm together to Westminster Abbey to his coronation.

Two heralds bearing the Beaufort standard, the portcullis, and a dozen guards wearing the Stanley colors, hammer on the great door of the palace to inform me that Lady Margaret Stanley of the Beaufort family, My Lady the King’s Mother, is to honor me with a visit tomorrow. My mother inclines her head at the news and says softly—as if we are too nobly bred to ever raise our voices—that we will be delighted to see Her Grace.

As soon as they are gone and the door closed behind them, we fall into a frenzy about my dress. “Dark green,” my mother says. “It has to be dark green.”

It is our only safe color. Dark blue is the royal color of mourning, but I must not, for one moment, look as if I am grieving for my royal lover and the true king of England. Dark red is the color of martyrdom, but also sometimes, contradictorily, worn by whores to make their complexions appear flawlessly white. Neither association is one we want to inspire in the stern mind of the strict Lady Margaret. She must not think that marriage to her son is a torment for me, she must forget that everyone said that I was Richard’s lover. Dark yellow would be all right—but who looks good in yellow? I don’t like purple and anyway it is too imperial a color for a humbled girl whose only hope is to marry the king. Dark green it has to be and since it is the Tudor color, this can do nothing but good.

“But I don’t have a dark green gown!” I exclaim. “There isn’t time to get one.”

“We had one made for Cecily,” my mother replies. “You’ll wear that.”

“And what am I supposed to wear?” Cecily protests mutinously. “Am I to come in an old gown? Or will I not appear at all? Is Elizabeth going to be the only one who meets her? Are the rest of us to be in hiding? D’you want me to go to bed for the day?”