The shrill alarm from a shawm was real this time, and soon the air was filled with pealing bells, loud trumpets, and most frightening of all for those inside a castle, the grinding sound of the portcullis being lowered and the drawbridge raised against attack. Dickon ran to his mother’s side, terrified. Edmund swept him up in his arms, and Dickon was surprised to see fear in his brother’s eyes, too. It made him feel better that he was not alone.

“Come boys, we must prepare for our royal visitors,” their mother said airily, as though the king was here merely to dine with them. Despite himself—and the threatening horde at the gates—Edmund managed a smile.

Dickon stared at his mother’s retreating figure in astonishment. Prepare for the visitors? Is she serious? Doesn’t she know fear? he wondered. If the duchess was not afraid, then perhaps he could pretend he wasn’t either.

“You will fight the king?” Dickon whispered, daring to question his father, who had come to wish his boys goodnight. “What about the attainting thing?”

“Dickon!” George hissed, making York smile wanly.

“’Tis his right to ask, George. It is in God’s hands now, Richard. But I must save England,” he said and drew the boy to him. “It would be Englishman against Englishman,” he told them both, “and nobody wants that. So I suspect the king will relent. Pray for me and your brothers. Pray very hard, and perhaps the king will see reason and go away.”

But Dickon could not let it rest. “If you do fight the king and win, Father, who will be king then? Will it be you?”

Was this the right time to wend his way through the Yorkist claim to the throne, Richard wondered. Nay, he would wait to explain the vagaries of the Plantagenet family tree that had led King Henry VI to sit on the throne. Some day, he would have to explain how, when the fourth Henry, called Bolingbroke, deposed his cousin Richard II at the end of the previous century, he had skipped over one of his uncles, Lionel, second son of Edward III, whose sole progeny, and thus insignificant, was a daughter. But Richard of York was descended from that daughter as well as from Edward III’s fourth son, Edmund of York. No one had questioned—or challenged—the Lancastrian line to the throne until now, and it was only because of this Henry’s inability to govern that York was asserting his claim. All this passed through York’s mind as quickly as he chose instead to say: “Edouard, prince of Wales is heir to the throne as you well know, Dickon, should the king die….” he paused, “…let us leave it at that for now. God give you both a good night. We can talk more on the morrow.”

“But…but, do you want to be king, Father?” The question was innocently asked but that night it exasperated York.