“Welshman,” I say quietly.

On Christmas Day we go to church and celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and pray for the health of his most beloved son and soldier Jasper Tudor. But on the day after, Henry comes to my room unannounced early in the morning and sits on the foot of my bed as I sleepily rise up, and Cecily, who is sleeping with me, jumps up, curtseys, and scuttles out of the room.

“He’s gone,” Henry says. He does not sound grieved so much as amazed. “My Lady Mother and I were sitting with him and he stretched out his hand to her and he smiled at me, and then he lay back on his pillows and breathed out a long sigh—and then he was gone.”

There is a silence. The depth of his loss is so great that I know I can say nothing to comfort him. Henry has lost the only father he ever knew; he is as bereft as an orphan child. Clumsily, I get to my knees, my big belly making me awkward, and I stretch my arms out towards him to hold him. He has his back to me and he does not turn, he does not realize I am reaching out to him in pity. He is all alone.

For a moment I think he is absorbed in grief, but then I realize that the loss of Jasper only adds to his perennial fears.

“So who is going to lead my army against the boy and the Scots?” Henry asks, speaking to himself, cold with fear. “I am going to have to face the boy in battle, in the North of England, where they hate me. Who is going to command if Jasper has left me? Who will be at my side, who can I trust, now that my uncle is dead?”

PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, WINTER 1496

Maggie comes into my room with so rapid a step and with so fierce a glance towards me that I can tell, knowing her as I do, that she is desperate to speak with me. I am sitting with My Lady the King’s Mother, with sewing in my hands, listening to one of her women reading one of her eternal homilies on religion, reading aloud from a hand-copied manuscript, for God knows no one would bother to print such a dirge, and Maggie curtseys to us both and sinks to a stool and takes up some sewing and tries to look composed.

I wait till the end of a chapter and for the girl to turn the manuscript page, and I say, “I will walk in the garden.”

My Lady looks out of the window where a gray full-bellied sky promises snow and says, “You had much better wait until the sun comes out.”

“I’ll wear my cloak, and my muff and my hat,” I say, and my ladies, after a little hesitating glance at My Lady the King’s Mother in case she is going to overrule me, fetch my things and wrap me as if I were a bulky parcel.