My mother comes in at dinnertime, holding Maggie’s hand. “We’ve come to join you,” she says.

Maggie is white as if she were deathly sick, her eyes red-rimmed from crying.

“What about Teddy?”

My mother shakes her head. “They took him to the Tower.”

“Why would they do that?”

“They shouted À Warwick when they fought Jasper Tudor in the North. They carried the standard of the ragged staff in London,” my mother says, as if this is reason enough.

“They were fighting for Teddy,” Maggie tells me. “Even though he didn’t ask them to—even though he would never ask them to. He knows not to say such things. I’ve taught him. He knows that King Henry is the king. He knows to say nothing about the House of York.”

“There’s no charge against him,” my mother says briefly. “He’s not charged with treason. Not charged with anything. The king says he is only acting to protect Teddy. He says that Teddy might be seized by rebels and used by them as a figurehead. He says that Teddy is safer in the Tower for now.”

My laughter at this extraordinary lie turns into a sob. “Safer in the Tower! Were my brothers safer in the Tower?”

My mother grimaces.

“I’m sorry,” I say at once. “Forgive me, I’m sorry. Did the king say how long he will keep Teddy there?”

Maggie goes quietly to the fireside and sinks down onto a footstool, her head turned away. “Poor child,” my mother says. To me she replies, “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. They took Teddy’s clothes and his books. I think we have to assume that His Grace will keep him there until he feels safe from rebellion.”

I look at her, the only one of us who may know how many rebels are biding their time, waiting for a call to rise for York, seeing the last skirmish as a stepping-stone to another, and from that to another—not as a defeat. She is a woman who never sees defeat. I wonder if she is their leader, if it is her determined optimism that drives them on. “Is something going to happen?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

PRIOR’S GREAT HALL, WINCHESTER, 19 SEPTEMBER 1486