“It won’t be so bad,” Meg tried to sound encouraging, “and you will be back soon.” She had no inkling that she would get her turn later to go to Burgundy, but as a bride.

On her way to the boys’ chamber, Cecily had decided to make the hurried departure into an escapade. “We are going to outwit the queen. If she thinks she will find you here and capture you—just as your father captured the king—she will be disappointed, because you won’t be here. You are going to escape the She-wolf’s claws! Do not forget what she did to your father and…” She stopped as she now had the boys’ attention.

“How clever of you, Mother,” George said, grasping the urgency at once. “I am ready to go.”

Dickon squeezed from his mind the gory image of his father’s head on Micklegate and concentrated on his present dilemma. “But what about you and Meggie, and Nurse Anne, and Beatrice….” Dickon countered, obstinate now. “Why just us? I won’t leave you behind. We walked together at Ludlow, and we will stay with you now. Father told George and me to look after you.”

Cecily pulled Dickon to her, and he wrapped his arms about her. She was proud of her youngest and regretted bitterly that Richard would never watch the boy grow into a man. “We shall be fine, I promise, so please do as I say.” She tweaked his bonnet. “’Tis not the first time you have been without me, is it? So be brave. For me. For Meg. For us all.”

“’Twill be an adventure, Dickon!” George chimed in. “We are going on a real adventure.”

Dickon tried to sound enthusiastic. “An adventure, but where? Will we be safe?”

“You will be safe where you are going, truly you will. And Ned will be proud of you,” Cecily assured her youngest, although she had no idea how she was going to carry out this daring plan or if indeed the duke of Burgundy would welcome her sons. At least she had to try. One of her squires, John Skelton, had been entrusted with two hastily written letters, one of which would introduce him and her boys to the English Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp, and the second was to be delivered into no other hands but Philip of Burgundy’s. She had to trust that young Skelton would carry out her instructions. It had tested her fortitude to consign the missives and this responsibility to the strapping squire, whose only outward sign of trepidation was a slight trembling of his hand as he had taken the letters from her.

Cecily knelt in front of her boys and explained. “’Tis for your own safety, boys. If something should happen to Edward—pray God it does not—then you and Dickon are York’s heirs. And thus are heirs to the crown.”

George nodded, understanding. “Where, Mother? Where are we going?”