“You don’t know who he is,” I say flatly to Henry. “You have spent a small fortune and had Sir William pay half the mourning mothers in Christendom for their stories, and you still don’t know who he is. You have no idea who he is.”

“I will have his history,” he says simply. “I will have his history even if I have to write it myself. I can tell you some of it already. He turns up somewhere, into some family somewhere, ten years ago. He’s with them for something like four years. Then Sir Edward Brampton happens by, and takes him to Portugal—Sir Edward admits that himself. In Portugal they call the boy Richard Duke of York, and he’s known in the Portuguese court as the missing prince. Then, he’s dismissed by Sir Edward, it doesn’t matter why, and the boy travels with Pregent Meno—Meno admits that too, I have it in writing. Meno takes him to Ireland, the Irish rise up for him, they call him Richard Duke of York—I have their confessions—and he escapes to France. King Charles of France accepts him as the York prince, but just when he is to be handed over to me, he escapes to your aunt.”

“You have all this written down?” I ask.

“I have signed reports from witnesses. I can trace him every moment of every day from Portugal,” Henry says.

“But nothing before then. Nothing to show that he is born and bred into the family somewhere,” I point out. “You say yourself that he turns up there. He himself will say that he turns up there from England, rescued from the Tower. Everything that you have written down, sworn to for certain, does nothing to disprove his claim. Everything you have collected as evidence only confirms him as a son of York.”

He crosses the room in one swift stride and snatches up my hand, holding it so tightly that the bones are crushed together. I flinch but I won’t cry out.

“That’s all I have for now,” he says through gritted teeth. “As I said. What I don’t have I will write myself. I will write this boy’s parentage into his story, I will create it: common people, nasty people. The father a bit of a drunk, the mother a bit of a fool, the boy a bit of a runaway, a wastrel, a good-for-nothing. D’you think I can’t write this and get someone—a drunk married to a fool—to swear to it? Do you think I can’t set up as historian? As storyteller? D’you think I can’t write a history which years from now, everyone will believe as the truth? I am the king. Who shall write the record of my reign if not me?”

“You can say anything you like,” I say levelly. “Of course you can. You’re the King of England. But it doesn’t make it true.”

A few days later Maggie, my cousin, comes to me. Her husband has been made Arthur’s Lord Chamberlain, but they cannot take up residence in Wales while the west is threatened by a rival prince. “My husband, Sir Richard, tells me that the king has found a name for the boy.”