Henry sends out commissions to seek for traitors in every county of England. He thinks they will root out treason. I think that all they will do, wherever they go, is prove to the people that the king thinks there is treason everywhere. All Henry tells the market towns when his yeomen of the guard march in and set up a hearing for the local gossips is that their king is afraid of everyone, even the tongue-waggers in the alehouses. All he demonstrates is that their king is afraid of almost everything, like a child dreading the darkness at bedtime who imagines threats everywhere.

Jasper Tudor comes back to Westminster after scouring the country for treason, looking exhausted, gray with fatigue. He is a man of sixty-three, who thought he had brought his beloved nephew to the throne in a blaze of courage nearly a decade ago, and that the great task of his life was done. Now he finds that for every man who died on the battlefield fighting against them, there are ten enemies in hiding, twenty, a hundred. York was never defeated, it just stepped back into the shadows. For Jasper, who fought all his life against York, who suffered exile from his own beloved country for nearly twenty-five years, it is as if his great victory over the House of York has never happened. York is stepping forwards again and Jasper has to find his courage, find his power, and ready himself for another battle. But now he is an old man.

His wife, my aunt Katherine, sends him out on his mission with an obedient curtsey and a hard face. Half the people he will arrest and see hanged are loyal servants of our house and personal friends to her. But My Lady the King’s Mother, who has loved him, I believe, ever since she was a young widow and he was her only friend, looks at him with hollow eyes, as if she would drop to her knees before him and beg him to save her boy again, as he has saved him so often before. They shrink into themselves, the king, his mother and his uncle, trusting no one else now.

Thomas, Lord Stanley, whose loveless marriage to My Lady the King’s Mother brought him to greatness and brought an army to her son, is excluded from their councils, as if he shares a taint of treason with his dead brother. If they cannot trust the brother-in-law of My Lady the King’s Mother, if they cannot trust her husband, if they cannot trust their own kinsmen that they have loaded with honor and money, then who can they trust?

They can trust no one, they fear everyone.

Henry never comes to my rooms in the evenings anymore. Terrified of a boy, he cannot think of making another child. We have the heirs that he needs: our own boy and his little brother. Henry looks at me as if he cannot contemplate making another child on me, one that would be half York, one that would be half traitor by birth. All the warmth, all the tenderness that was growing between us is frozen out by his terror and mistrust. As his mother looks at me askance, as the king puts out his hand to lead me in to dinner but hardly touches my fingers, I walk like the traitor Sir William: with my head up, as if I refuse to feel shame.