“Is he going to invade?”

Margaret puts the coronal on my head. I see my wondering face in the looking-glass before me, my eyes wide, my face pale. For a moment I seem like my mother, for a moment I am a beauty as she was. I pat my white cheeks. “I look like I have seen a ghost.”

“We all look like that,” Margaret says, a weak reflected smile over my head as she fastens the amethysts around my neck. “We are all going around as if a ghost is on his way to us. They are singing in the streets about the Duke of York, who dances in Ireland and plays in Scotland and will walk in an English garden and everyone will be merry again. They say he is a ghost come to dance, a duke brought back from the dead.”

“They say it is my brother,” I say flatly.

“The King of Scotland says that he will put his life on it.”

“And what does your husband say?”

“He says there will be war,” she replies, the smile fading from her face. “The Scots will invade to support Richard, they will invade England, and there will be war.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1495

Henry’s uncle Jasper comes home from one of his long hard rides as pale as the men that he has tried and sent to the gallows, with deep lines of weariness grooved into his face. He is old, much more than sixty, and he has worked this year like a man desperate to see his nephew safe on his throne, terribly aware that time is running out for them both. Old age is dogging him, disaster is walking at Henry’s heels.

My aunt Katherine, always a dutiful wife, puts him to bed in their rich and comfortable rooms, calls physicians, apothecaries, and nurses to care for him, but she is elbowed aside by My Lady the King’s Mother, who prides herself on her knowledge of medicine and herbs and says that Jasper’s constitution is so strong that all he needs is good food, rest, and some tinctures of her own creation to get well. My husband Henry visits the sickroom three times a day, in the morning to see how his uncle has slept, before dinner to make sure that he has the very best that the kitchen can offer and that it is served to him first, hot and fresh, on bended knee, and then last thing at night, before he and his mother go to the chapel and pray for the health of the man who has been the keystone of their lives for so very long. Jasper has been like a father to Henry, and his only constant companion. He has been his protector and his mentor. Henry would have died without his uncle’s constant loving care. To My Lady, I think he has been the most potent of influences a woman can know: the love she never named, the life she never led, the man she should have married.