“Why don’t you go indoors, Lady Mother?”

“I am sick of being indoors. I am sick of everyone watching me.”

He offers me his arm, which I take with such a glow of pleasure to see my boy, my firstborn child, with the manners of a prince.

“Why are they watching you?” he asks gently.

“They want to know how I feel about Lady Katherine Huntly,” I say frankly. “They want to know if she troubles me.”

“Does she?”

“No.”

“His Grace, my father, seems very happy to have captured Mr. Warbeck,” he begins carefully.

I cannot help but giggle at my boy Arthur practicing diplomacy. “He is,” I say.

“Though I am surprised to find Mr. Warbeck in favor, and at court. I thought that my father was taking him to London and would imprison him in the Tower.”

“I think we are all surprised at your father’s sudden mercy.”

“It’s not like Lambert Simnel,” he says. “Mr. Warbeck isn’t a falconer. What is he doing coming and going so freely? And is my father paying him a wage? He seems to have money to pay for books and to gamble. Certainly my father gives him the best clothes and horses, and his wife, Lady Huntly, lives in state.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Does he spare him for your sake?” he asks very quietly.

My face is quite expressionless. “I don’t know,” I say again.

“You do know, but you won’t say,” Arthur asserts.

I hug his arm. “My son, some things are safer left unsaid.”

He turns to face me, his innocent face puzzled. “Lady Mother, if Mr. Warbeck is indeed who he said he was, if he is being allowed the run of the court for that reason, then he has a greater right to the throne than my father. He has a greater right to the throne than me.”

“And that is exactly why we will never have this conversation,” I reply steadily.

“If he is who he says he is, then you must be glad he is alive,” he pursues, with all the doggedness of a young man in pursuit of the truth. “You must be glad to see him. It must be as if he were snatched from death, almost as if he were risen from the dead. You must be happy to see him here, even if he never sits on the throne. Even if you pray that he never sits on the throne. Even if you want the throne for me.”

I close my eyes so that he does not see the glow of my happiness. “I am,” I say shortly; and he is a wise young prince, for he does not speak of this again.

We have dancing and celebrating, a joust and players. We have a choir sing most beautifully in the royal chapel, and we give away sweetmeats and gingerbread to two hundred poor children. The broken meats from the feast feed hundreds of men and women at the kitchen door for the twelve days. Henry and I lead out the dancers on the first day of Christmas, and I look behind me, down the line and see that Lady Katherine is dancing with her husband, and they are handclasped, both flushed, the handsomest couple in the room.