I can feel him flinch as I glare at him through the screen, as he arrives so slowly at understanding. “Exactly,” I say. “That’s the very thing. I have to lift the curse. Before anything else happens. I have to do it now.”

He is aghast at the prospect that is opening before him. “The curse would light on the man who ordered your brother’s death,” he says, as rapidly as prayer. “Even if it were a just death. Even if it were a legal execution. The curse would fall on he who ordered it?”

“Exactly,” I say again. “It would take his son and his grandson when they were still children. It would mean that such an executioner would find his line ends after two generations, with a girl. If it were the man who killed my brother Edward he would be doubly cursed.”

The archbishop is white. “You must pray,” he says fervently. “I will pray for you. We must give alms, set a priest to pray daily. I will give you spiritual exercises, prayers for every day. You must go on pilgrimage and I will tell you alms that you must give to the poor.”

“And will that lift the curse?”

He meets my eyes and I see my own terror reflected back at me, the Queen of England, mother to three precious beloved sons. “No one has power to curse,” he says staunchly, repeating the official belief of the Church. “No mortal woman. What you and your mother said was meaningless, the ravings of distressed women.”

“So nothing will happen?” I ask.

He hesitates and he is honest. “I don’t know,” he says. “I will pray on it. God may be merciful. But it may be that your curse is an arrow into the dark and you cannot stop its flight.”

THE ISLE OF WIGHT, SUMMER 1499

I come out of confinement to find a court intent on merrymaking. We are to make a long progress along the south coast, passing through Kent and Sussex and Hampshire as if they had never lifted a blade against the king, as if they had never mustered for the boy. At Portsmouth we are to take ship and go to the Isle of Wight, that dim blue mass on the horizon. We are going to be happy. Most important, we are going to be seen to be happy.

Henry wears a smile like a mask. Lady Katherine is on his arm, everywhere he walks, her beautiful new horse, a black mare, goes shoulder to shoulder with his warhorse. He has taken to riding his warhorse again as if to remind everyone that he is a commander as well as a king. She inclines her head when he talks to her, she smiles as she listens. When he is merry we can hear her laugh, and when he asks her she sings for him, Scots songs, songs from the highlands, filled with melancholy for a land that is lost, until he says: “Lady Katherine, sing us something merry!” and she laughs and starts a round and the whole court joins in.