They find him within a few days. Henry seems to know exactly where to look for him, almost as if he had been bundled, drugged, thrown out of a boat onto the riverbank, and left to sleep it off. They say that he had gone up the valley of the Thames, on foot, stumbling on the tow path, splashing through marshes, following the course of the river through thick woodland and over hedged fields, to the charterhouse at Sheen, where the former prior had once been a good friend to my mother, and where the current prior took the boy in and gave him sanctuary. Prior Tracy himself rode to Henry, asked for an audience, and begged for the young man’s life. The king, bombarded with pleas for clemency, with a holy prior down on his knees refusing to rise until the boy is granted his life, once again decides to be gracious. With his mother seated beside him, as if they are both judges on the Last Day, he rules that the boy should stand on a scaffold of empty wine barrels for two days, to be seen by everyone who passes by, mocked, cursed, scorned, and a target for any urchin with a handful of filth, and then be taken to the Tower of London, and there be imprisoned pending the king’s pleasure: that is, forever.

THE TOWER OF LONDON, SUMMER 1498

They keep him in the Garden Tower. I imagine Henry laughing his new overconfident ringing laugh at the irony of the boy who said he was Prince Richard being returned to where Prince Richard was last seen. They put the boy in the very rooms where Prince Richard and Prince Edward were kept.

The window that overlooks the green was where their little faces could sometimes be seen, and sometimes they would wave at people who gathered on the green to see them or, coming out of chapel, call a blessing to them. Now there is one pale face at the window—the boy’s—and people who see him closely say that he has lost his looks, he is almost unrecognizable for the bruises on his face. His nose has been broken and is ugly, squashed cross-wise against his handsome face. He has a bloody scar behind his ear where someone kicked him when he was down, and the ear itself is half torn away and has gone sticky and fetid.

No one now would mistake him for a York prince. He looks like an alehouse brawler, injured many times, who has gone down once too often and cannot rise again. No one will fall in love with his smile now that his front teeth have been kicked in. No one ever again will be swayed by his York charm. No one gathers on the green now to wave at him, no one reports that they have seen him, as if seeing him is an event, something to write home to a village: I have seen the prince! I went to the Tower and I looked towards his window. I saw him wave, I saw his radiant smile.