Now he is a prisoner, like any other in the Tower. He has been sent there to avoid attention and little by little everyone will forget him.

His wife, Lady Katherine, will not forget him, I think. Sometimes I look at her downturned face and I think she will never forget him. She has learned a deep fidelity that I do not recognize. She has changed from her eternal hemming of fine linen to working on a thick homespun. She is sewing a warm jacket, as if she knows someone who lives inside damp stone walls and who will never again bask in the sun. I don’t ask her why she is making a warm thick jacket lined with silks of deep red and blue—and she does not volunteer a reason. She sits in my rooms, her head bent over her sewing, and sometimes she glances up and smiles at me, and sometimes she puts down her work and gazes out of the window, but she never says one word about the boy she married, and she never ever complains that he broke his parole, broke his word to her, and is paying for it.

Margaret comes to visit court, traveling from my son’s court in Ludlow, and of all the places in my rooms, she chooses a seat beside Lady Katherine, saying nothing. Each young woman takes a silent comfort from the other’s nearness. It is part of Henry’s great joke on the House of York that Margaret’s brother, Teddy, is housed in the same tower as Katherine’s husband; he lives on the floor below. The two boys, one the son of George Duke of Clarence, and one who claimed to be the son of Edward King of England, are in rooms so close that if the boy stamped on the floor then Teddy would hear him. Both of them are walled up behind the thick cold stones of our oldest castle for the crime of being a son of York, or—worse—claiming to be one. Truly, it is still a cousins’ war; for here is a pair of cousins, imprisoned for kinship.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1498

The child I am carrying sits heavily against my spine and my legs ache as if I have an ague. Sitting, lying, walking, all cause me pain. This is the child that we conceived the night of Henry’s deep joy that the boy had run from court and broken his parole. I think he weighs so heavily on my back because his father lay so heavily on me that night, because there was no pleasure in our coupling, there was no love in it, there was Henry bearing down on me, on England, on the boy, aroused by his own triumph.

I miss my mother in this season, when the leaves fall like a blizzard of brown and gold and my windows are hazy with mist in the morning. I miss her when I see the bright shiver of yellow birch leaves reflected in the gray of the river water. Sometimes I can almost hear her voice in the plashing of the water against the stone pilings of the pier, and when a seagull suddenly cries, I almost start up, thinking it is her voice. If it is her son in the Tower, I owe it to her, to him, to my house, to try to get him released.