“Forgive me, Your Grace. But the boy has got away.”

“Got away?” Henry repeats the words almost as if they have no meaning. “How do you mean: got away?”

His mother glances at him sharply, as if she hears like me the detachment in his voice like a man repeating words he has prepared.

“The boy?” she demands. “The Warbeck boy?”

“Escaped,” one of them says.

“How could he escape? He’s not imprisoned?” I ask.

They bow their heads at the incredulity in my voice. “He had a key cut to fit the lock.” One of them looks up to tell me. “His companions were asleep, perhaps drugged, they slept so heavily. He opened the door and walked out.”

“Walked out?” Henry repeats.

“He had a key.”

“Walked out?”

“Perhaps he drugged the guards.”

Some strange prescience teaches me to look, not at Henry’s well-manifested surprise and growing anger, but at his mother. She is looking at him, not with her usual expression of approbation and approval, but as if she has never seen him before, as if he is doing something which surprises even such a wily old plotter as herself. I sink back down into my chair again.

“How could he have got a key? How could he have got drugs?” Henry demands, loud enough to be heard through the door in the presence chamber where anyone could be waiting to wish him the best of the day, ears pricked for gossip.

Nobody replies that the boy could have got anything he wanted, since Henry himself had given him free run of the court and an allowance of money which would cover the price of some leather trim for his saddle, or a feather for his hat, or indeed cheap sleeping powders and a fee to a locksmith. Nobody points out that if the boy wanted to escape, he could have walked down to the stables and taken his horse and ridden away any day since last October. He did not have to wait till the nighttime, when he would be locked in and then need a key to get himself out. The whole story has a fairy-tale quality to it, like his name, like his history. Now the boy, who once passed as a prince only because someone dressed him in a silk shirt, disappears from a locked room in the dead of night.

“He must be recaptured!” Henry shouts.

He snaps his fingers for one of his clerks and the man bustles in, his tonsure shining, his writing desk around his neck, his quills sharpened at the ready. Henry rattles off a string of orders: the ports to be locked shut, the sheriffs of every county to be on alert to look for the boy, messengers to ride down the main highways to alert all the inns and guesthouses along the way.

“Pay a reward for his recapture, dead or alive,” his mother suggests.

I keep my gaze on my plate and I don’t say quickly, “Oh, they are not to hurt him!” I am a princess of York and I know that the stakes are always those of life or death. And he will have known this too; he will have known, when he slipped away into the darkness, that he was signing his own death warrant. Once he broke his parole they would be certain to go after him with a sword.

“I think I’ll tell them to bring him in alive,” Henry says carelessly, as if it does not much matter either way. “I would not want to distress Lady Katherine.”

“She will be distressed,” I observe.

“Yes, but now she must see that her husband has run away and left her, run like a coward and left her as if he did not regard himself as married anymore,” Henry said firmly to me, impressing me with his view. “She must see that he can care nothing for her if he would just go—abandon her completely.”

“Faithless.” His mother nods.

“You had better go and break the news to her,” Henry says. “Tell her that he organized his own escape and he did it quite without honor, drugging a guard and sneaking out like a thief. Leaving her alone, and their son fatherless. She must despise him for this. I expect she will get her marriage annulled.”

I rise from my seat and as he pulls back the heavy wooden chair for me I turn and face him, my gray eyes looking into his dark ones. “I shall certainly tell her that you think she should despise him, I shall certainly tell her that you think she should regard herself as a single woman, as you have always done. In addition, shall I assure her that your motives are chivalrous when you call for her marriage to be annulled?” I ask icily, and I walk out and leave him and his mother to call for a map of the kingdom and calculate where the boy might be.

That night, Henry comes to my bedroom, surprising me and Cecily, who was going to be my bedmate for the night. She scuttles from the room, pulling her robe around her as Henry strolls in, bringing a jug of mulled ale, and a glass of wine for me, just as he used to do when we were happy together.

He gives me my glass, sits at the fireside, pours himself a tankard of ale, and drinks a deep draft, like a man who has reached a safe haven and can afford to celebrate.

“He was plotting, you know,” he says shortly. “Plotting his escape with Flanders, with France, with Scotland. The usual allies. The friends who never forget him.”

I don’t ask who “he” is. “They helped him get out?” I ask.

Henry chuckles, puts out his booted foot, and kicks a log that is teetering on the edge of the fire. “Well, someone certainly helped him. Bundled him out and set him free.”

I find that I am looking at him coldly, trying to understand what he is saying. “Was he drugged like his guards?” I ask eventually. “Was he drugged and kidnapped and put out of the castle?”

Henry does not meet my eyes. Again, he reminds me of Harry, who will twist his finger in his hair and look at his boots and tell me whatever little lie would best suit his case.

“How would I know?” Henry says. “How ever would I know what these traitors will do?”

“So where is he now?”

He chuckles. This, he is willing to admit. “I know where. I’ll give him a few days to know his predicament. He’s on his own, he has no supporters. He’ll sleep cold and damp. I’ll pick him up tomorrow, or the day after, soon.”

I curl my feet up in my chair. “And why is this a triumph for us? Since you come to me to celebrate?”

He smiles at me. “Ah, Elizabeth. You know me so well! It is a triumph, though it is a hidden one. I had to break this new habit, this accidental accord that had come about. I never thought he would be like this, at the heart of my own court! There he was, happy as a pig in clover, sneaking into his wife’s rooms—don’t deny it, I know he was—and dancing with the ladies, writing poems, singing songs, going hunting, all at my expense, dressed like a prince and everywhere greeted like one. That’s not what I wanted when I dragged him out of sanctuary and named him as a common pretender. I had him in chains at Exeter. I had him confessing everything I put before him. He signed anything I wanted, he took whatever name I gave him. He was humbled to dirt, the son of a drunk boatman. I didn’t expect him to bob up, bob up into her bedroom. I didn’t expect him to come to court and charm everyone he met. I didn’t expect him to live like a prince when I had made him confess that he was a liar and a cheat. I didn’t think she would . . . who would have dreamed that she would . . . a princess?”

“Stand by him?”

“Go on loving him,” he says quietly. “When I had made him look a fool.”

“What did you want? What did you hope would happen?”

“I thought everyone would see that he was a pretender, like the other feigned lad, Simnel, my falconer. I thought they would cluster to see him and laugh at his impertinence and then forget all about him. I thought he would be humbled by being kept around us, I thought he would sink.”

“Sink?”

“I thought he would disappear into the crowd of hangers-on and placemen and toadies and beggars who go with us everywhere. Chased off now and then, reprimanded here and there, but always trailing along behind, living hand to mouth. I thought he would become one of them. I thought he would be the page boy at the back of the procession, the one that no one likes, who gets a kicking when the Master of the Horse is drunk. I thought people would despise him. I didn’t expect him to shine.”

“I did nothing to recognize him.” I make it clear. “I never brought him into my company. He was never invited into my rooms.”

“No,” Henry says thoughtfully. “But he strolled in as if he belonged there. He made his own place. People liked him, gathered round him. He was just . . .” He pauses and then he says the one betraying word: “Recognized.”