My eyes are filling with tears from the smoke of the fire, but I know that there is no point in weeping. I rub my face and go to find the children in the big chamber at the top of the west tower that serves as their schoolroom and playroom. My sixteen-year-old sister Cecily has been singing with them this morning, and I can hear their voices and the rhythmic thud of the tabor as I climb the stone stairs. When I push open the door, they break off and demand that I listen to a round they have composed. My ten-year-old sister Anne has been taught by the best masters since she was a baby, our twelve-year-old cousin Margaret can hold a tune, and her ten-year-old brother Edward has a clear soprano as sweet as a flute. I listen and then clap my hands in applause. “And now, I have news for you.”

Edward Warwick, Margaret’s little brother, lifts his heavy head from his slate. “Not for me?” he asks forlornly. “Not news for Teddy?”

“Yes, for you too, and for your sister Maggie, and Cecily and Anne. News for all of you. As you know, Henry Tudor has won the battle and is to be the new King of England.”

These are royal children; their faces are glum, but they are too well trained to say one word of regret for their fallen uncle Richard. Instead, they wait for what will come next.

“The new King Henry is going to be a good king to his loyal people,” I say, despising myself as I parrot the words that Sir Robert Willoughby said to me as he gave me my mother’s letter. “And he has summoned all of us children of the House of York to London.”

“But he’ll be king,” Cecily says flatly. “He’s going to be king.”

“Of course he’ll be king! Who else?” I stumble over the question I have inadvertently posed. “Him, of course. Anyway, he has won the crown. And he will give us back our good name and recognize us as princesses of York.”

Cecily makes a sulky face. In the last weeks before Richard the king rode out to battle, he ordered her to be married to Ralph Scrope, a next-to-nobody, to make sure that Henry Tudor could not claim her as a second choice of bride, after me. Cecily, like me, is a princess of York, and so marriage to either of us gives a man a claim to the throne. The shine was taken off me when gossip said that I was Richard’s lover, and then Richard demeaned Cecily too by condemning her to a lowly marriage. She claims now that it was never consummated, now she says that she does not regard it, that Mother will have it annulled; but presumably she is Lady Scrope, the wife of a defeated Yorkist, and when we are restored to our royal titles and become princesses again, she will have to retain his name and her humiliation, even if no one knows where Ralph Scrope is today.