“Will you execute him?” I ask, keeping my voice light and level. “Do you think you will execute him?”

Henry puts down his tankard and throws off his cloak and then his nightgown. He gets into my bed naked, and I just glimpse that he is aroused. Winning excites him, catching someone out, tricking someone, getting money off them or betraying their interest brings him so much pleasure that it makes him amorous.

“Come to bed,” he says.

I show no sign of unwillingness. I don’t know what might depend upon my behavior. I untie the ribbons on my nightgown and I drop it to the floor, I slide between the sheets and he grabs me at once, pulls me beneath him. I make sure that I am smiling as I close my eyes.

“I can’t execute him,” he says quietly, thrusting inside me with the words. I keep my smile on my face as he makes love while speaking of death. “I can’t behead him, not unless he does something stupid.” Heavily he moves on me. “But the joy of him is that he is certain to do something stupid,” he remarks, and his weight bears down on me.

For a manhunt for a known traitor, a claimant to the throne, the ghost that terrorized Henry’s life for thirteen years, the pursuit is curiously leisurely. The guards who slept on duty are cautioned and return to their posts, though everyone expected them to be tried and executed for their part in the escape. Henry sends out messengers to the ports but they travel easily, setting out to north and west, south and east, as if riding for pleasure on a sunny day. Inexplicably, Henry sends out his own personal guard, his yeomen, in boats, rowing upstream, as if the boy might have gone deeper into England, and not to the coast to get back to Flanders, to Scotland, to safety.

His wife has to sit with me while we wait for news. She has not gone back into widow’s black but she is no longer gorgeous in tawny velvet. She wears a dark blue gown and she sits half behind me, so that I have to turn to speak to her, and so that visitors to my rooms, even the king and his mother, can hardly see her, hidden by my great chair.

She sews—heavens, she sews constantly; little shirts for her son, exquisite nightcaps and nightgowns fit for a prince, little socks for his precious feet, little mittens so that he does not scratch his peerless complexion. She bends her head over her work and she sews as if she would stitch her life together again, as if every small hemming stitch would take them back to Scotland, to the days when it was just her and the boy, in a hunting lodge, and he was full of the stories of what he had done and what he had seen and who he said that he was—and nobody asked him what he might do and what he might claim and who he would have to deny.