“This is the third time you have seen Lady Margaret sail by in triumph,” I remark to my mother. “Once when King Henry was restored and she led the race to get to his court and introduce her son, once when her husband was high in Richard’s favor and she carried Queen Anne’s train at the coronation, and look, now she sails by you again.”

“Yes,” she acknowledges. I see her gray eyes narrow as she watches the gloriously gilded barge and the proud flap of the standards. “But I always find her so very . . . unconvincing, even in her greatest triumphs,” she says.

“Unconvincing?” I repeat the odd word.

“She always looks to me like a woman who has been badly treated,” my mother says, and she laughs joyously out loud, as if defeat is just a turn of the wheel of fortune and Lady Margaret is not on the rise and an instrument of the glorious will of God as she thinks, but has just been lucky on this turn, and is almost certain to fall on the next. “She always looks to me like a woman who has much to complain about,” my mother explains. “And women like that are always badly treated.”

She turns to look at me, and laughs aloud at my puzzled expression. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “At any rate, we have her word that Henry will marry you, as soon as he is crowned, and then we’ll have a York girl on the throne.”

“He shows few signs of wanting to marry me,” I say dryly. “I am hardly honored in the coronation procession. It’s not us on the royal barge.”

“Oh, he’ll have to,” she says confidently. “Whether he likes it or not. The Parliament will demand it of him. He won the battle, but they won’t accept him as king without you at his side. He has had to promise. They’ve spoken to Thomas, Lord Stanley, and he, of all men, understands the way that power lies. Lord Stanley has spoken to his wife, she has spoken to her son. They all know that Henry has to marry you, like it or not.”

“And what if I don’t like it?” I turn to her and put my hands on her shoulders so she cannot glide away from my anger. “What if I don’t want an unwilling bridegroom, a pretender to the crown, who won his throne through disloyalty and betrayal? What if I tell you that my heart is in an unmarked grave somewhere in Leicester?”

She does not flinch, but confronts my angry grief, her face serene. “Daughter mine, you have known for all your life that you would be married for the good of the country and the advancement of your family. You will do your duty like a princess, wherever your heart is buried, whoever you want or don’t want, and I expect you to look happy as you do it.”

“You’ll marry me to a man that I wish were dead?”