He goes back to the table where his letters and his secret ciphers and his seals are carefully laid out. He never writes a letter now, he always composes code. He hardly ever writes so much as a note, it is always a secret instruction. It is not the writing table of a king but of a spymaster. “I won’t detain you,” he says shortly. “But if someone says so much as one word to you—I expect you to tell me. I want to hear anything, everything—the slightest whisper. I expect this of you.”

I am about to say of course I would tell him, what else does he think I would do? I am his wife, his heirs are my beloved sons, there are no beings in the world that I love more tenderly than his own daughters—how can he doubt that I would come to him at once? But then I see his dark scowl and I realize that he is not asking for my help; he is threatening me. He is not asking for reassurance but warning me of his expectation that must not be disappointed. He does not trust me, and, worse than that, he wants me to know that he does not trust me.

“I am your wife,” I say quietly. “I promised to love you on our wedding day and since then I have come to love you. Once we were glad that such love had come to us; I am still glad of it. I am your wife and I love you, Henry.”

“But before that, you were his sister,” he says.

KENILWORTH CASTLE, WARWICKSHIRE, SUMMER 1493

Once again Henry moves the court to Kenilworth Castle, the safest in England, centrally placed so that he can march out to any coast to meet an invasion, easily defended if everything goes wrong and an invasion sweeps inland to him. This time there is not even the pretence of being a carefree court in summertime; everyone is afraid, certain that they are attached to a king who is facing invasion for the second time in only eight years, convinced that a better claimant to the throne is gathering his forces against Henry Tudor: a pretender now as he always has been.

Jasper Tudor, grim-faced, rides out to the West Country and Wales to uncover the dozens of local conspiracies that are joining together to welcome an invasion. None of the people of the west is for Tudor, they are all looking for the prince over the water. Henry himself opens other inquiries, riding from one place to another, chasing whispers, trying to find those who are behind the constant flow of men and funds to Flanders. Everywhere from Yorkshire to Oxfordshire, from the east to the central counties, Henry’s appointed men hold inquiries trying to root out rebels. And still the reports of treasonous groups, hidden meetings, and musters after dark come in every day.