“Forgive me, Your Grace. But the boy has got away.”

“Got away?” Henry repeats the words almost as if they have no meaning. “How do you mean: got away?”

His mother glances at him sharply, as if she hears like me the detachment in his voice like a man repeating words he has prepared.

“The boy?” she demands. “The Warbeck boy?”

“Escaped,” one of them says.

“How could he escape? He’s not imprisoned?” I ask.

They bow their heads at the incredulity in my voice. “He had a key cut to fit the lock.” One of them looks up to tell me. “His companions were asleep, perhaps drugged, they slept so heavily. He opened the door and walked out.”

“Walked out?” Henry repeats.

“He had a key.”

“Walked out?”

“Perhaps he drugged the guards.”

Some strange prescience teaches me to look, not at Henry’s well-manifested surprise and growing anger, but at his mother. She is looking at him, not with her usual expression of approbation and approval, but as if she has never seen him before, as if he is doing something which surprises even such a wily old plotter as herself. I sink back down into my chair again.

“How could he have got a key? How could he have got drugs?” Henry demands, loud enough to be heard through the door in the presence chamber where anyone could be waiting to wish him the best of the day, ears pricked for gossip.

Nobody replies that the boy could have got anything he wanted, since Henry himself had given him free run of the court and an allowance of money which would cover the price of some leather trim for his saddle, or a feather for his hat, or indeed cheap sleeping powders and a fee to a locksmith. Nobody points out that if the boy wanted to escape, he could have walked down to the stables and taken his horse and ridden away any day since last October. He did not have to wait till the nighttime, when he would be locked in and then need a key to get himself out. The whole story has a fairy-tale quality to it, like his name, like his history. Now the boy, who once passed as a prince only because someone dressed him in a silk shirt, disappears from a locked room in the dead of night.

“He must be recaptured!” Henry shouts.

He snaps his fingers for one of his clerks and the man bustles in, his tonsure shining, his writing desk around his neck, his quills sharpened at the ready. Henry rattles off a string of orders: the ports to be locked shut, the sheriffs of every county to be on alert to look for the boy, messengers to ride down the main highways to alert all the inns and guesthouses along the way.

“Pay a reward for his recapture, dead or alive,” his mother suggests.

I keep my gaze on my plate and I don’t say quickly, “Oh, they are not to hurt him!” I am a princess of York and I know that the stakes are always those of life or death. And he will have known this too; he will have known, when he slipped away into the darkness, that he was signing his own death warrant. Once he broke his parole they would be certain to go after him with a sword.