“No,” Henry says thoughtfully. “But he strolled in as if he belonged there. He made his own place. People liked him, gathered round him. He was just . . .” He pauses and then he says the one betraying word: “Recognized.”

I give a little gasp. “Someone recognized him as Prince Richard? My brother?”

“No. No one would be such a fool. Not at my court. Not surrounded by spies. He was recognized for himself. People saw him as a power, as a person, as a Someone.”

“People just happen to like him.”

“I know. I can’t have that. He has that damned charm that you all have. I can’t have him at court being happy, being charming, looking like he belongs here. But—and this was the problem—I had given my word to him when he surrendered to me. His wife went down on her knees to me, and I gave my word to her. And she held me to it. She would never have allowed me to imprison him or put him on trial.”

He frowns at the glowing embers of the fire, quite unaware that he is confiding to his wife the commands of his mistress.

“And there’s another thing. I established that he is the son of a Flanders boatman—which I thought a very good story at the time—but of course that makes him no subject of mine, so I can’t try him for treason. He’s not my subject, he’s not treasonous. I wish someone had warned me of that when we were going to such trouble to find his parents in Flanders. We should never have found them in Flanders, we should have found them in Ireland, somewhere like that.”

I absorb in silence the cynicism of the creation of the boy’s story.

“So now I have two bad choices: either I can’t try him for treason because he’s foreign, or—”

“Or?”

“Or he’s not foreign but the rightful king!” Henry bursts out laughing, swigs from his tankard, looks at me bright-eyed over the dull pewter. “You see? If he’s who I say he is, then I can’t try him for treason. If he’s who he says he is, then he should be King of England and I am the traitor. Either way I was stuck with him. And every day he grew more and more happy that I was stuck with him. So I had to get him out, I had to make him betray the sanctuary that I had given him.”

“Sanctuary?”

He laughs again. “Wasn’t he born in sanctuary?”

I take a breath. “It was my brother Prince Edward who was born in sanctuary,” I say. “Not Richard.”

“Well, anyway,” he says carelessly. “So the main thing is that I’ve got him out of his comfortably safe billet at my court. Now he’s on the run, I can prove that he’s plotting against me. He’s broken his word that he would stay at court. He’s dishonored his promise to his wife too. She thought he would never leave her; well, he has. I can arrest him for breaking his parole. Put him in the Tower.”