I nod. I know that I am beaming, I cannot hide my joy. “In my own right. And the lands. All my brother’s lands are returned to us.”

“We’re rich?” Reginald suggests.

I nod. “We are. We’re one of the richest families in the whole kingdom.”

Ursula gives a little gasp and clasps her hands together.

“This is ours?” Arthur confirms, looking round. “This house?”

“It was my mother’s house,” I say proudly. “I shall sleep in her great chamber, where she lay with her husband, the king’s brother. It’s as big a palace as any in London. I can just remember it, when I was a little girl. I can remember living here. Now it is mine again, and you shall call it home.”

“And what country houses?” Arthur asks eagerly.

I see the avidity in his face, and I recognize my own greed and excitement. “I’m going to build,” I promise him. “I’m going to build a great house of brick, a castle fitted out as richly as any palace, at Warblington in Hampshire. It’ll be our biggest house. And we’ll have Bisham, my family house, in Berkshire, and this house in London, and a manor at Clavering in Essex.”

“And home?” Reginald asks. “Stourton?”

I laugh. “It’s nothing compared with these,” I say dismissively. “A little place. One of our many other houses. We have dozens of houses like Stourton.” I turn to Montague. “I shall arrange a great marriage for you, and you shall have a house and lands of your own.”

“I’ll marry,” he promises. “Now that I have a name I can offer.”

“You’ll have a title to offer your bride,” I promise him. “Now I can look around and find someone suitable. You have something to bring to a marriage. The king himself calls me ‘cousin.’ Now we can look for an heiress whose fortune will match yours.”

He looks as if he might have a suggestion, but he smiles and keeps it to himself for the moment.

“I know who,” Arthur teases him.

At once, I am alert. “You can tell me,” I say to Montague. “And if she is wealthy and well bred I will be able to arrange it. You can take your pick. There’s not a family in the kingdom who would not think it an honor to be married into ours, now.”

“You’ve gone from pauper to princess,” Reginald says slowly. “You must feel as if God has answered your prayers.”

“God has sent me nothing more than justice,” I say carefully. “And we must, as a family, give thanks for that.”

Slowly, I become accustomed to being wealthy again, as I had to become accustomed to being poor. I order builders into my London home, and they start to transform L’Erber from the great palace that it is into an even more imposing house, paving the forecourt, carving beautiful wooden panels for the great hall. At Warblington I commission a castle, with a moat and a drawbridge and a chapel and a green, everything just as my parents would have had, just like Middleham Castle in my childhood, when I had known I was born for greatness and never dreamed that it could all disappear overnight. I build the equal of any castle in the land, and I create beautiful guest rooms for when the king and court come to stay with me, their great subject in her own great castle.

Everywhere I put my coat of arms, and I have to confess every day to the sin of pride. But I don’t care. I want to declare to the world: “My brother was no traitor, my father no traitor either. This is an honorable name, this is a royal standard. I am the only countess in England holding a title in my own right. Here is my stamp upon my many houses. Here am I. Alive—no traitor. Here am I!”

My boys enter court life like the princes they are. The king immediately takes to Arthur for his courage and skill at the joust. My kinsman George Neville served my sons well when he brought them up and taught them everything they needed to know to be popular courtiers. Montague is easy and elegant in the royal rooms; Arthur is one of the bravest jousters at a court that cares for nothing more than bravery. He is one of the few men who dare ride against the king, one of the very, very few who can beat him. When Arthur unseats the King of England, he flings himself off his own horse, brushing past pages to help Henry to his feet, and Henry bellows with laughter and holds Arthur in his arms. “Not yet, Cousin Plantagenet! Not yet!” he shouts and they roar together as if a fallen king is a great joke, and a Plantagenet standing over an unseated Tudor can only be a fine, comradely jest.

Reginald studies at the university, Ursula serves beside me in the queen’s rooms at court, Geoffrey stays at the nursery rooms in L’Erber with his tutors and companions and sometimes comes to court to serve the queen. I cannot bring myself to send him away to the country, not after the grief of losing my older boys, not after the lasting pain of Reginald’s exile. This boy, my youngest boy, my baby, I will keep at home. I swear I will have him by my side until he is married.

The king is desperate to go to war and determined to punish the French for their advances in Italy, determined to defend the Pope and his lands. In the summer my cousin Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset, leads an expedition to take Aquitaine but can do nothing without the support of the queen’s father, who refuses to play his part in their joint battle plans. Thomas is blamed for this and for the misconduct of his troops, and a shadow falls, once again, over his reputation as a Tudor supporter and our family.

“The fault is not in your cousins, Your Grace, but in your father-in-law,” the blunt-spoken northern lord Tom Darcy tells the king. “He did not support me when I went on crusade. He has not supported Thomas Grey. It is your ally, not your generals, who is at fault.”

He sees me watching him, and he gives me a small wink. He knows that all my family fear the loss of Tudor favor.

“You might be right,” Henry says sulkily. “But the Spanish king is a great general and Thomas Grey is certainly not.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1513

This summer the court and my boys can think of nothing but harnesses and armor, horses and provisions. The king’s new advisor Thomas Wolsey proves to be uniquely able to get an army on the move, ordering the goods where they are needed, controlling the mustering of troops, commanding the smiths to forge pikes and the saddlers to make jackets of leather. The detail, the constant orders about transport, supplies, and timing—which no nobleman can be bothered to follow—is all that Wolsey thinks about, and he thinks about nothing else.