I face him, I rub his kiss from my mouth with the back of my hand. “You need not threaten me,” I say icily. “You can spare me your insults. I know my duty to my position and to my son. I’m not going to disinherit my own son. I will do as I think right. I am not afraid of you, I have never been afraid of you. I will serve the Tudors for the sake of my son—not for you, not for your threats. I will serve the Tudors for Arthur—a true-born king of England.”

He nods, relieved to see his safety in my unquestionable love for my boy. “If any one of you Yorks speaks of the boy other than as a young fool and a stranger, I will have him beheaded that same day. You will see him on Tower Green with his head on the block. The moment that you or your sisters or your cousin or any of your endless cousins or bastard kinsmen recognize the boy is the moment that you sign the warrant for his execution. If anyone recognizes him then they die and he dies. D’you understand?”

I nod my head and I turn away from him. I turn my back on him as if he were not a king. “Of course I understand,” I say contemptuously over my shoulder. “But if you are going to continue to claim that he is the son of a drunken boatman from Tournai, you must remember not to have him beheaded like a prince on Tower Green. You’ll have to have him hanged.”

I shock him, he chokes on a laugh. “You’re right,” he says. “His name is to be Pierre Osbeque, and he was born to die on the gallows.”

With ironic respect I turn back to him and sweep a curtsey, and in this moment I know that I hate my husband. “Clearly, we will call him whatever you wish. You can name the young man’s corpse whatever you wish, that will be your right as his murderer.”

We do not reconcile before he rides out and so my husband goes out to war with no warm farewell embrace from me. His mother gives him her blessing, clings to his reins, watches him go while she whispers her prayers, and looks curiously at me, as I stand dry-eyed and watch him ride off at the head of his guard, three hundred of them, to meet with Lord Daubney.

“Are you not afraid for him?” she asks, her eyes moist, her old lips trembling. “Your own husband, going out to war, to battle? You did not kiss him, you did not bless him. Are you not afraid for him riding into danger?”

“Really, I doubt very much that he’ll get too close,” I say cruelly, and I turn and go inside to the second-best apartment.

EAST ANGLIA, AUTUMN 1497