There is a long silence as I realize what he has said. Slowly, the horror of his mistrust opens like a chasm below my feet. “Henry, you cannot think that I am your enemy?”

“I am watching you,” he says, not answering. “My mother is watching you. And you will not have my son and heir in your keeping. If you want to go anywhere with him, you will go with men that I can trust.”

My rage leaps up and I round on him, shaking. “Men you can trust? Name one!” I spit. “Can you? Can you name even one?”

He puts his hand to his heart as if I have rammed him in the chest. “What do you know?” he whispers.

“I know that you can trust no one. I know that you are in a lonely hell of your own making.”

NORTHAMPTON, AUTUMN 1493

We move to Northampton and Henry receives the courtiers that he had sent to negotiate with my aunt, the dowager duchess. All trade is to be banned between England and Flanders, nobody can come and go, and Flanders shall have no English wool while the boy, the one boy, holds his little court, and the determined woman who claims he is her nephew writes urgently to other kings and queens, pressing his claims.

Henry’s representatives gleefully report that they have insulted my aunt. At her very court, in her presence, they suggested that she scrapes the countryside of bastard boys to send against Henry Tudor. They made a scurrilous joke suggesting that the boy is her love child. They say she is like many older women: mad for sex, or maddened by sex, or simply mad because she is a woman and everyone knows that women’s grasp of reason is a weak one. They say that she is a mad woman from a mad family and so my grandmother Cecily Duchess of York, nearly eighty years old, and my dead mother and I, and all my sisters and my cousin Margaret are insulted too. Henry lets all these things be said by his ambassadors, and repeated in my hearing, as if he does not care what filth is thrown at York, as long as something sticks which besmirches the boy.

I hear this gossip flinty-faced, I don’t demean myself to complain. Henry is stooping very low, he has lost all judgment. To insult the boy, to insult my aunt, he will say anything. I see his mother watching me, bright-eyed with her own delirious fears, and I turn my head away as if I do not want to see her, nor hear the abuse her son commands.

But the ambassador William Warham did not waste his time in Flanders in slandering my aunt; he had his clerks and his men search the country for families who are missing a boy. Hundreds of people responded, people who now say that twenty years ago they lost a newborn from the cradle; could this be the boy? People who say that their child wandered off and never returned; did the duchess steal him? People whose beloved child fell into the river and was swept downstream and the body never found—is he alive and pretending to be Richard Duke of York? One applicant after another comes forwards to tell their sad stories of missing children; but there is nothing to link even one of them to the boy who behaves so courteously in his little palace, who speaks so warmly of his father, and who visits his aunt Margaret so comfortably.