He looks at me and watches the protest die on my lips.

“Your side lost at Bosworth,” he reminds me. “You are the spoils of war.”

COLDHARBOUR PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS FEAST, 1485

To celebrate the days of Christmas I am invited to visit my betrothed at his court and am taken to the finest rooms of the palace of Coldharbour, where his mother holds her court. As I enter, with my mother and two sisters walking behind me, a hush spreads through the room. A lady-in-waiting, reading from the Bible, looks up and sees me, trails off, and there is silence. Lady Margaret, seated on a chair under a canopy of state as if she were a queen crowned, looks up and calmly regards us as we come forwards.

I sweep her a curtsey; behind me I see my mother’s carefully judged sinking down and rising up again. We have practiced this most difficult movement in my mother’s rooms, trying to determine the exact level of deference. My mother has a steely dislike for Lady Margaret now, and I will never forgive her for telling her son to rape me before our wedding. Only Cecily and Anne curtsey with uncomplicated deference, as a pair of minor princesses to the king’s all-powerful mother. Cecily even rises with an ingratiating smile, since she is Lady Margaret’s goddaughter and counting on this most powerful woman’s goodwill to make sure that her wedding goes ahead. My sister does not know, and I will never tell her, that they would have taken her, as coldly as they took me, if I had failed to conceive, and she would have been raped in my place while this flint-faced woman prayed for a baby.

“You are welcome to Coldharbour,” Lady Margaret says, and I think it is well named, for it is a most miserable and unfriendly haven. “And to our capital city,” she goes on, as if we girls had not been brought up here in London while she was stuck with a small and unimportant husband in the country, her son an exile and her house utterly defeated.

My mother looks around the rooms, and notes the second-rate cloth cushions on the plain window seat, and that the best tapestry has been replaced by an inferior copy. Lady Margaret Beaufort is a most careful housekeeper, not to say mean.

“Thank you,” I say.

“I have the arrangements for the wedding all in hand,” she says. “You can come to be fitted for your gown in the royal wardrobe next week. Your sisters and your mother also. I have decided that you will all attend.”

“I am to attend my own wedding?” I ask dryly, and see her flush with annoyance.

“All your family,” she corrects me.

My mother gives her blandest smile. “And what about the York prince?” she asks.

There is a sudden silence as if a snap frost has just iced the room. “The York prince?” Lady Margaret repeats slowly, and I can hear a tremor in her hard voice. She looks at my mother in dawning horror, as if something terrible is about to be revealed. “What d’you mean? What York prince? What are you saying? What are you saying now?”