Two nights later, an auburn-haired woman knelt at the head of the crude bier on which Richard’s body had been lain by the monks of Greyfriars. Kate had kept vigil all night, praying that Richard’s tortured soul was now soothed in his wife’s eternal embrace. But as dawn filtered through the leaded panes, one of the brothers touched her arm and motioned for her to leave.

It was time to bury the fallen king, he told her kindly.

Sadly, Kate turned her gaze away for the final time and slipped out of the side chapel. She could hear the chipping of a pickaxe on tile and earth somewhere in the nave near the altar, and the sound made her shiver.

“He is being buried in this church?” she asked. “Forgive me, Brother, but he should be buried alongside his wife in Westminster. He was the Lord’s anointed, you remember? King Henry owes him decent burial.”

“The new king has washed his hands of him, mistress. We must bury him swiftly here. But in recognition of his noble status, he will be buried with our founder in the nave. We dare not disobey.”

Kate shook her head. “A king with no decency is no king of mine,” she muttered and hurried away. She knew now what she must do. Feeling for the écu beneath her bodice, she returned to the Wygston house, a plan already in place in her mind. She must go to Kent and tell her son, Dickon, who his real parents were. She would finally claim him, entrust him with the talisman, and tell him the real story of Richard of Gloucester. Already she could hear the falsehoods that would be passed from mouth to mouth and from year to year and down the centuries. At least Richard’s two sons would know the truth about their father.

At noon on the twenty-fifth day of August in the first year of King Henry the Seventh’s reign, the abbot of the Grey Friars monastery stood at the hastily dug gravesite in the nave, his eyes lifted to the altar crucifix and his hands in prayer. He had chastised the grave diggers for not measuring the corpse properly, causing Richard’s now-cleansed head to be unnaturally tilted over his left shoulder to fit his meagre grave. His arms were forcibly tied at the wrists, which fell to his right side, “to save room,” the gravedigger said. At least a piece of russet had been laid modestly over his loins, but the wounds and bruises were still livid against his pallid skin. The abbot had also been disturbed by how shallow the hole was, barely deep enough to cover his body.