I nod. “And Henry won’t let her go. He looks for her every morning in chapel, he can’t close his eyes and say his prayers until he has seen her. It makes me feel . . .” I break off and I blot my eyes with the corner of my sleeve. “I’m such a fool but it makes me feel unwanted. It makes me feel plain. I don’t feel like the first lady of the court of England. I don’t feel that I am where I should be, in my mother’s place. I’m not even in my usual second place to My Lady the King’s Mother. I have dropped below that. I am humbled. I am Queen of England but disregarded by the king my husband, and the court.” I pause and try to laugh, but it comes out as a sob. “I feel plain, Maggie! For the first time in my life! I feel humbled! And it’s hard.”

“You are the first lady, you are the queen, nobody and nothing can take that from you,” she insists fiercely.

“I know. I know that really,” I say sadly. “And I married without love, and now it seems that he loves someone else. It is ridiculous that I should care at all. I married him thinking of him as my enemy. I married him hating him and hoping for his death. It should be nothing to me that he now lights up when another woman enters the room.”

“But you do care?”

“Yes. I find that I do.”

The court prepares joyfully for Christmas. Arthur is summoned to his father, who tells him that his betrothal to the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon is confirmed and will take place. Nothing can delay it, now that the monarchs of Spain are confident that there is no pretender threatening Henry’s throne. But they write to their ambassador to ask him why the pretender has not been executed, as they had expected either his death in battle or a prompt beheading on the battlefield. Why has he not been put on trial and swiftly dispatched?

Lamely, the ambassador replies to them that the king is merciful. As merciless usurpers themselves, they do not understand this, but they allow the betrothal to go ahead, stipulating only that the pretender should die before the marriage ceremony. That is mercy enough, they suggest. The ambassador hints to the king that Isabella and Ferdinand, the King and Queen of Spain, would prefer it if there was not a drop of doubtful blood left in the country, not Perkin Warbeck, nor Maggie’s brother; they would prefer it if there were no heir of York at all.

“Not Lady Huntly’s baby?” I ask. “Shall we be Herods now?”

Arthur comes to walk with me in the garden, where I am huddled in my furs and striding out for warmth, my ladies trailing away behind me. “You look cold.”

“I am cold.”