“But he made a promise,” I say uncertainly. “He has given his word.”

Henry’s face is dark and angry. “No promise given to that boy counts before God.”

His servants come in with his hat, his gloves, his riding boots, his cape. Another goes running to the stables to order his horses, the guard is mustering in the yard, a messenger is riding for all the guns and cannon that London has.

“You’re going to your army?” I ask. “You’re riding out?”

“I’ll meet with Daubney and his army,” he says. “We’ll outnumber them by three to one. I’ll fight him with odds like these.”

I catch my breath. “You’re going now?”

He kisses me perfunctorily, his lips cold, and I can almost smell the scent of his fear. “I think we’ll win,” he says. “As far as I can be certain, I think we’ll win.”

“And what will you do then?” I ask. I dare not name the boy and ask what Henry plans for him.

“I will execute everyone who has raised a hand against me,” he says grimly. “I will show no mercy. I will fine everyone who let them march by and did not stop them. When I have finished, there will be no one left in Cornwall and Devon but dead men and debtors.”

“And the boy?” I ask quietly.

“I will bring him into London in chains,” he says. “Everyone has to see that he is a nobody, I will throw him down into the dust and when everyone understands at last that he is a boy and no prince, I will have him killed.”

He looks at my white face. “You will have to see him,” he says bitterly, as if all of this is my fault. “I will want you to look him in the face and deny him. And you had better make sure that you say no word, give no look, not a whisper, not even a breath of recognition. Whoever he looks like, whatever he says, whatever nonsense he spouts when he is asked: you had better be sure that you look at him with the gaze of a stranger, and if anyone asks you, you don’t know him.”

I think of my little brother, the child that my mother loved. I think of him looking at picture books on my lap, or running around the inner courtyard at Sheen with a little wooden sword. I think that it will not be possible for me to see his merry smile and his warm hazel eyes and not reach out to him.

“You will deny him,” Henry says flatly. “Or I will deny you. If you ever, by so much as a word, the whisper of a word, the first letter of a word, give anyone, anyone to understand that you recognize this imposter, this commoner, this false boy, then I will put you aside and you will live and die in Bermondsey Abbey as your mother did. In disgrace. And you will never see any of your children again. I will tell them—each one of them—that their mother is a whore and a witch. Just like her mother, and her mother before that.”