My Lady lets them do their work, as she has no appetite for countermanding me in my own rooms anymore. Since the death of Jasper she has aged a dozen years. I look at her now and sometimes I no longer see the powerful woman who dominated me and my husband, but instead a woman who spent all her life on a cause, sacrificed the love of her life for her son, and now waits to hear if the cause is lost and her son is on the run again.

“Margaret, will you give me your arm?” I ask.

Maggie rises with careful lack of interest, as if she had planned to stay indoors, and puts on her own cloak.

“You must have a guard,” My Lady rules. “And you three—” she points to the nearest women, barely looking to see who they are “—you three shall walk with Her Grace.”

They do not look very pleased at the thought of a cold walk with snow coming, but they rise and fetch their capes from their rooms and with a guard before and behind us, and ladies around us, finally Maggie and I are alone together and we can talk without being overhead.

“What?” I say tersely as soon as the guards are ahead and the women lagging behind. Maggie takes my arm to save me from slipping on the frosty ground. Beside us the gray, cold river is rimmed with white on the banks, while a seagull, no whiter than the frost, calls once overhead and then wheels away.

“He’s married,” she says shortly.

She never needs to say his name. Indeed, we maintain the convention that we have no name for him.

“Married!” At once I have a clutch of fear that he has married beneath himself, some sympathetic serving girl, some opportunistic widow who has loaned him money. If he has married badly, then Henry will crow with joy and scorn him, calling him Peterkin and Perkin all the more, the son of a drunkard and a drudge, now wedded to a slut. Everyone will say that it proves he is no prince, but a lowly pretender. Or they will say that he has learned common ways, vulgar ways, to be dazzled by the widow of some minor grandee and marry her for her dower money. If his bride is unchaste, some slattern in a hovel, he might as well give up and go home.

I stop still. “Oh, dear God, Maggie. Who is she?”

She is beaming. “A good marriage, even a great marriage. He has married Katherine Huntly, kinswoman to the King of Scotland himself, daughter of the Earl of Huntly, the greatest lord of Scotland.”

“The Earl of Huntly’s daughter?”

“And they say she is a beauty. She was given in marriage by King James himself. They were betrothed before Christmas, they are married now, and they are already saying that she is with child.”

“My little bro . . . Ri . . . he is married? The boy is married?”