“You know that she was plotting all the time,” I say. “She was writing to you, she was writing to your son. You would know more than I do about that time. Did she tell you she had him safe? Have you kept that secret, all this long time?”

She whips back her hand as if I were as hot as the embers in the hearth. “What d’you mean? No! She never told me such a thing!”

“You were plotting with her to free us, weren’t you?” I ask, as sweet as sugared milk. “You were plotting with her to bring in your son to save us? That was why Henry came to England? To free us all? Not to take the throne, but to restore it to my brother and to free us?”

“But she didn’t tell me anything,” Lady Margaret bursts out. “She never told me anything. And though everyone said that the boys were dead, she never held a Requiem Mass for them, and we never found their bodies, we never found their murderers nor any trace or whisper of a plot to kill them. She never named their killers and no one ever confessed.”

“You hoped that people would think it was their uncle Richard,” I observed quietly. “But you didn’t have the courage to accuse him. Not even when he was dead in an unmarked grave. Not even when you publicly listed his crimes. You never accused him of that. Not even Henry, not even you had the gall to say that he murdered his nephews.”

“Were they murdered?” she hisses at me. “If it was not Richard? It doesn’t matter who did it! Were they murdered? Were they both killed? Do you know that?”

I shake my head.

“Where are the boys?” she whispers, her voice barely louder than the flicker of flame in the hearth. “Where are they? Where is Prince Richard now?”

“I think you know better than me. I think you know exactly where he is.” I turn back to her, and I let her see my smile. “Don’t you think it is him, in Scotland? Don’t you think he is free, and leading an army against us? Against your own son—calling him a usurper?”

The anguish in her face is genuine. “They’ve crossed the border,” she whispers. “They’ve mustered a massive force, the King of Scotland rides with the boy at the head of thousands of men, he’s cast cannon, bombards, he’s organized them—no one has seen such an army in the North before. And the boy has sent a proclamation . . .” She breaks off, and from inside her gown she draws it out. I cannot deny my curiosity; I put out my hand and she passes it over. It is a proclamation by the boy, he must have had hundreds made, but at the bottom is his signature, RR—Ricardus Rex, King Richard IV of England.

I cannot take my eyes from the confident swirl of the initial. I put my finger on the dry ink; perhaps this is my brother’s signature. I cannot believe that my fingertip will not sense his touch, that the ink will not grow warm under my hand. He signed this, and now my finger is on it. “Richard,” I say wonderingly, and I can hear the love in my voice. “Richard.”