As soon as the cock crowed on the appointed day of departure, Nurse Anne roused Dickon and helped him to dress. “I trust you will be a good boy and not cause any trouble on the road, mon petit,” she counseled him. “I am to sit up with the driver, but not to forget I have les yeux in the back side of my head.”

Dickon was wide-eyed in his innocence. Had Nurse Anne guessed his secret? “Trouble? What sort of trouble?”

The faithful old nursemaid chuckled, put her arms about the fidgeting Dickon and held him close. For nearly twenty years she had nurtured the duke and duchess’s many children. She had sat with the duchess while they listened to the feeble cries of two of the babes who did not live to see their second sunrise, and had taken little Brigid from her mother’s arms when Cecily refused to believe the infant was dead; she had cried when her first charge, Anne, had been sent away to be married so young; and she had been as proud as any mother at the blossoming of the heir, Edward, into a giant of a young man, yet had thought nothing of upbraiding him for his wandering eye. Whether she was getting soft in her dotage, she did not know, but she had never felt as protective of a child as she did this youngest of the Yorks.

An hour later, Dickon, holding his cloak tightly around him, climbed nimbly into the carriage behind his siblings and huddled on a seat in the corner. The vehicle was nothing more than a brightly painted cart with a wooden roof holding leather curtains that could be rolled up and down according to the weather, but it proudly flew the pennants of the house of York, the white roses mingling with the falcon and fetterlock.

The little cavalcade was already halfway through the outer bailey when an angry shout came from the carriage.

“Stop, I say! Stop!” It was George’s voice. What now? Anne thought crossly. Only a nursemaid can truly know her charges, and, sadly for her, this boy, with his shallow, self-centered nature, had lost his charm.

As she turned to see that a squabble between George and Dickon had turned into a fully fledged fight, she smacked the driver’s hand to make him stop. Meg was attempting to pull the boys apart while the armed escort reined in their mounts and stared openmouthed. The captain of the guard was clearly amused, but Roger Ree rode up to the carriage and demanded an end to the fracas.

George glared at his father’s emissary and pointed at Richard. “It is his fault, Master Ree,” he cried, imperiously. “Dickon has smuggled his dog aboard. Look! ’Tis not permitted. Master Hood said they were too young to leave.”