“Let me see that!” Lady Margaret exclaims, and snatches it from my hand.

“You can keep it,” I say dryly. “You can take it to your son. But he won’t thank you for it.”

The look she turns on me is quite horrified. “Your own yeoman of the guard,” she whispers. “Gone to the boy. And Henry’s own groom has gone.”

“He has? I didn’t know.”

She nods. “Sir Ralph Hastings’s steward has gone and taken all the family’s silver to Malines. And Sir Edward Poynings’s own tenants . . . Sir Edward, who was our ambassador in Flanders, can’t keep his own men here. There are dozens of men, slipping away—hundreds.”

I glance back at my ladies. The reading has stopped and everyone is leaning forwards trying to hear what is being said; there is no mistaking the avidity on their faces, Maggie and Cecily among them.

The commander of my guard dips his head in a bow and steps backwards and closes the door behind him. But My Lady the King’s Mother rounds on me in a fury, flinging a pointing finger to my kinswomen.

“We married those girls—your sister and your cousin—to men we could trust, so that their interests would lie with us, to make them Tudors,” she hisses at me, as if it is my fault that they are eager for news. “Now we can’t be sure that their husbands aren’t hoping to rise as Yorks, and their interests go quite the other way. We married them to loyal nobodies, we gave men who had almost nothing a princess of York so that they would be true to us, so that they would be grateful. Now perhaps they think that they can take their makeshift wives and reach for greatness.”

“My family is faithful to the king,” I say staunchly.

“Your brother . . .” She swallows her accusation. “Your sister and your cousin have been established and enriched by us. Can we trust them? While everyone is running away? Or will they too use their fortune and their husbands against us?”

“You chose their husbands,” I say dryly into her white anxious face. “There’s no point complaining to me if you fear that your handpicked men are faithless.”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1494

The court takes no joy in the coming of summer, and though I buy Arthur his first horse and his first proper saddle, and then have to comfort Henry, who demands a full-size horse of his own, as good as his brother’s, I cannot pretend that it is a summer as it should be, or that the court is a happy one. The king goes everywhere shrouded in silence, his mother spends most of her time in the chapel, and every time someone is missing from dinner or from prayers, everyone looks around and whispers, “Has he gone too? Dear God, has he gone as well? To the boy?”

It is as if we are players on a small tawdry stage, like players who pretend that all is well, that they are comfortable on their stools in their ill-fitting crowns. But anyone looking to the left or to the right can see that this false court is just a few people perched on a wagon, trying to create an illusion of grandeur.