“That little thing Anne Neville?” I demand, immediately diverted. “They would give her to that monster Edward, to make sure her father does not play false?”

“They will,” my mother agrees. “She is only fourteen and they are marrying her to a boy who was allowed to choose how to execute his enemies when he was eleven years old. He was raised to be a devil. Anne Neville must be wondering if she is rising to be queen or falling among the damned.”

“But it changes everything for George,” I say, thinking aloud. “It was one thing to fight his brother, the king, when he hoped to kill him and succeed him-but now? Why would he fight Edward when he gains nothing for himself? Why would he fight his brother to put the Lancaster king and then the Lancaster prince on the throne?”

“I suppose he didn’t think such a thing would happen when he set sail with a wife near her time, and a father-in-law determined to win the crown. But now he has lost his son and heir, and his father-in-law has a second daughter who could be queen. George’s prospects are changed very much. He should have the sense to see that. But d’you think he has?”

“Someone should advise him.” Our eyes meet. I never have to spell things out for my mother: we understand each other so well.

“Shall you visit the king’s mother before dinner?” Mother asks me.

I take my foot from the pedal of the spinning wheel and stop it with my hand. “Let’s go and see her now,” I suggest.

She is sitting with her women sewing an altar cloth. One of them is reading from the Bible as they work. She is famously devout; her suspicion that we are not as saintly as she, worse, perhaps pagans, worst of all, perhaps witches, is just one of the many fears she holds against me. The years have not improved her view of me. She did not want me to marry her son, and even now, though I have proved my fertility and myself a good wife for him, she hates me still. Indeed, she has been so discourteous that Edward has given her Fotheringhay to keep her from court. As for me, I am not impressed by her sanctity: if she is such a good woman, then she should have taught George better. If she had the ear of God, she would not have lost her son Edmund and her husband. I curtsey to her as we enter, and she rises to curtsey low to me. She nods her women to pick up their work and go to one side. She knows I am not visiting her to inquire after her health. There is still no great love lost between us and never will be.

“Your Grace,” she says levelly. “I am honored.”

“My Lady Mother,” I say, smiling. “The pleasure is mine.”

We all sit simultaneously in order to avoid the issue of priority, and she waits for me to speak.

“I am so concerned for you,” I say sweetly. “I am sure you are worried about George, so far from home, proclaimed as a traitor, and all but entrapped with the traitor Warwick, estranged from his brother and from his family. His first baby lost, his own life in such danger.”

She blinks. She had not anticipated my concern for her favorite George. “Of course I wish he were reconciled to us,” she says cautiously. “It is always sad when brothers quarrel.”

“And now I hear that George is abandoning his own family,” I say plaintively. “A turncoat-not just against his brother but against you and against his own house.”

She looks at my mother for an explanation.

“He has joined Margaret d’Anjou,” my mother says bluntly. “Your son, a Yorkist, is going to fight for the Lancastrian king. Shameful.”

“He will be defeated for certain: Edward always wins,” I say. “And then he must be executed as a traitor. How can Edward spare him, even for brotherly love, if George takes up the Lancaster colors? Think of him dying with a red rose at his collar! The shame for you! What would his father have said?”

She is truly aghast. “He would never follow Margaret of Anjou,” she says. “His father’s greatest enemy?”

“Margaret of Anjou put George’s father’s head on a spike on the walls of York, and now he serves her,” I say thoughtfully. “How can any of us ever forgive him?”

“It cannot be so,” she says. “He might be tempted to join Warwick. It is hard for him to always come second to Edward, and-” She breaks off, but we all know that George is jealous of everyone: his brother Richard, Hastings, me, and all of my kin. We know she has filled his head with wild thoughts that Edward is a bastard and so he is the true heir. “And besides, what-”

“What good does it do him?” I supplement smoothly. “I see what you think of him. Indeed, he always thinks of nothing but his gain and never of loyalty or his word or his honor. He is all George and no York.”

She flushes at that, but she cannot deny that George has been the most selfish spoiled boy who ever turned coat.

“He thought when he went with Warwick that Warwick would make him king,” I say bluntly. “Then they found that nobody would have George for king if they could have Edward. Only two people in the country think George is a better man than my husband.”

She waits.

“George himself and you,” I say precisely. “Then he fled with Warwick because he did not dare face Edward after betraying him again. And now he finds that Warwick’s plan has changed. Warwick will not put George on the throne. He will marry Anne his daughter to Edward of Lancaster; he will put the young Edward of Lancaster on the throne and become father-in-law to the King of England that way. George and Isabel are no longer his choice for King and Queen of England. Now it is Edward of Lancaster and Anne. The best that George can hope for is to be brother-in-law to the usurping Lancaster King of England instead of brother to the rightful York king.”

George’s mother nods.

“Little profit for him,” I observe. “For a great deal of work, and dreadful danger.”

I let her think on this for a moment. “Now, if he were to turn his coat again and come back to his brother, penitent and truly loyal, Edward would have him back,” I say. “Edward would forgive him.”

“He would?”

I nod. “I can promise it.” I don’t add that I will never forgive him, and that he and Warwick are dead men to me and have been ever since they executed my father and brother after the battle of Edgecote Moor, and they will be dead men hereafter, whatever they do. Their names are in the black locket in my jewelry case, and their names will never see the light again until they themselves are in the eternal darkness.

“It would be such a good thing if George, a young man without good advisors, could hear from someone, in private, in secret, that he could come back safely to his brother,” my mother observes at random, looking out of the window at the scudding clouds. “Sometimes a young man needs good advice. Sometimes he needs to be told that he has taken a wrong turning but that he can come back to the high road. A young man such as George should not be fighting for Lancaster, dying with a red rose on his collar. A young man like George should be with his family, with his brothers who love him.” She pauses to let his mother think this through. It is really beautifully done.

“If only someone could tell him that he was welcome at home, then you would have your son back, the brothers would be reunited, York would fight for York once more, and George would lose nothing. He would be brother to the King of England, and he would be Duke of Clarence as he has always been. We could undertake that Edward would restore him. There lies his future. This other way he is-what would one call him?” She pauses to wonder what one would call Cecily’s favorite son, then she finds the words: “An utter numpty.”

The king’s mother rises to her feet; my mother gets up too. I stay seated, smiling up at her, letting her stand before me. “I always so enjoy talking with you both,” she says, her voice trembling with anger.