The princess comes back to him as she promised to do and this time we tell her that it is the Sweat and she may go no closer to him than the threshold of his room. She says that she has to speak with him privately, orders us all from the room and stands on tiptoe, holding the doorjamb, calling across the herb-strewn floor to him. I hear a quick exchange of vows. He asks for a promise from her, she agrees but begs him to get well. I take her arm.

“For his own good,” I say. “You have to leave him.”

He has raised himself up on one elbow and I catch a glimpse of his deathly determined face. “Promise,” he says to her. “Please. For my sake. Promise me now, beloved.”

She cries out, “I promise!” as if the words are torn from her, as if she does not want to grant him his last wish, and I pull her from the room.

The bell on the grand castle clock tolls six. Arthur’s confessor gives him extreme unction and he lies back on his pillow and closes his eyes. “No,” I whisper. “Don’t let go, don’t let go.” I am supposed to be praying at the foot of the bed, but instead I have my hands clenched in fists pressing into my wet eyes and all I can do is whisper no. I cannot remember when I last left the room, when I last ate or when I last slept, but I cannot bear that this prince, this supremely beautiful and gifted young prince, is going to die—and in my care. I cannot bear that he should give up his life, this beautiful life so full of promise and hope. I have failed to teach him the one thing I most truly believe: that nothing matters more than life itself, that he should cling on to life.

“No,” I say. “Don’t.”

Prayers cannot stop him slipping away, the leeches, the herbs, the oils, and the charred heart of a sparrow tied on his chest cannot hold him. He is dead by the time the clock strikes seven. I go to his bedside and straighten his collar, as I used to do when he was alive, and close his dark, unseeing eyes, pulling the embroidered coverlet straight across his chest as if I were tucking him up for the night, and I kiss his cold lips. I whisper: “God bless you. Good night, sweet prince,” and then I send for the midwives to lay him out and I leave the room.

To Her Grace the Queen of England

Dear Cousin Elizabeth,

They will have told you already, so this is a letter between us: from the woman who loved him as a mother, to the mother who could not have loved him more. He faced his death with courage, as the men of our family do. His sufferings were short and he died in faith.

I do not ask you to forgive me for failing to save him because I will never forgive myself. There was no sign of any cause but the Sweat and there is no cure for that. You need not reproach yourself, there was no sign of any curse on him. He died like the beloved brave boy he was from the disease that his father’s armies unknowingly brought into this poor country.

I will bring his widow, the princess, to you in London. She is a young woman with a broken heart. They had come to love one another and her loss is very great.

As is yours, my dear.

And mine.

Margaret Pole

LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, SUMMER 1502

“If you are with child, and that child is a boy, then he will be the Prince of Wales and much later King of England,” I say to her gently, ignoring her tremulous fury. “You would become a woman as great as Lady Margaret Beaufort, who created her own title: My Lady the King’s Mother.”

She can hardly bring herself to speak. “And if I am not?”

“Then you are the dowager princess, and Prince Harry becomes the Prince of Wales,” I explain. “If you have no son to take the title, then it goes to Prince Harry.”

“And when the king dies?”

“Please God, that day is long coming.”

“Amen. But when it does?”

“Then Prince Harry is king and his wife—whoever she is—will be queen.”

She turns away from me and goes to the fireplace but not before I see the swift expression of scorn that crosses her face at the mention of Prince Arthur’s little brother. “Prince Harry!” she exclaims.

“You have to accept the position in life that God gives you,” I remind her quietly.

“I do not.”

“Your Grace, you have suffered a great loss, but you have to accept your fate. God requires us all to accept our fate. Perhaps God commands that you are resigned?” I suggest.

“He does not,” she says firmly.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1502

I pass through, nodding to one or two people whom I know; but I don’t stop. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to have to say, yet again: “Yes. It is a very sudden disease. Yes, we did try that remedy. Yes, it was a terrible shock. Yes, the princess is heartbroken. Yes, it is a tragedy that there is no child.”

I tap on the inner door and Lady Katherine Huntly opens it and looks at me. She is the widow of the pretender who was executed with my brother and there is no great love lost between us. She steps back and I go by her without a word.

The queen is kneeling before her prie-dieu, her face turned up to the golden crucifix, her eyes closed. I kneel beside her and I bow my head and pray for the strength to talk to our prince’s mother about the loss of him.

She sighs and glances at me. “I have been waiting for you,” she says quietly.

I take her hands. “I am sorrier than I can say.”

“I know.”

We kneel, hand-clasped in silence, as if there is nothing more that needs saying. “The princess?”

“Very quiet. Very sad.”

“There’s no chance that she could be with child?”

“She says not.”

My cousin nods as if she were not hoping for a grandchild to replace the son she has lost.

“Nothing was left undone . . .” I begin.

She puts her hand gently on my shoulder. “I know you will have cared for him as you would have cared for your own,” she says. “I know you loved him from babyhood. He was a true York prince, he was our white rose.”