The two men are waiting silently in the boat, holding it against the current with a rope through the ring on the stone steps, and I push my boy towards them and they lift him on board and seat him in the stern. There is no time for any farewells, and anyway there is nothing I can say but a prayer for his safety that catches me in the throat as if I have swallowed a dagger. The boat pushes off and I raise my hand to wave to him, and see his little white face under the big cap looking back at me.

I lock the iron gate behind me, and then go back up the stone steps, silent through the silent catacombs, and I look out from my window. His boat is pulling away into the river traffic, the two men at the oars, my boy in the stern. There is no reason for anyone to stop them. There are dozens like them, hundreds of boats crisscrossing the river, about their own business, two workingmen with a lad to run errands. I swing open my window but I will not call to him. I will not call him back. I just want him to be able to see me if he glances up. I want him to know that I did not let him go lightly, that I looked for him until the last, the very last moment. I want him to see me looking for him through the dusk, and know that I will look for him for the rest of my life, I will look for him till the hour of my death, I will look for him after death, and the river will whisper his name.

He does not glance up. He does as he was told. He is a good boy, a brave boy. He remembers to keep his head down and his cap pulled down on his forehead to hide his fair hair. He must remember to answer to the name of Peter, and not expect to be served on bended knee. He must forget the pageants and the royal progresses, the lions at the Tower, and the jester tumbling head over heels to make him laugh. He must forget the crowds of people cheering his name and his pretty sisters who played with him and taught him French and Latin and even a little German. He must forget the brother he adored who was born to be king. He must be like a bird, a swallow, who in winter flies beneath the waters of the rivers and freezes into stillness and silence and does not fly out again until spring comes to unlock the waters and let them flow. He must go like a dear little swallow into the river, into the keeping of his ancestress Melusina. He must trust that the river will hide him and keep him safe, for I can no longer do so.

I watch the boat from my window and at first I can see him in the stern, rocking as the little wherry moves in steady pulses, as the boatman pulls on the oars. Then the current catches it and they go faster and there are other boats, barges, fishing boats, trading ships, ferryboats, wherries, even a couple of huge logging rafts, and I can see my boy no longer and he has gone to the river and I have to trust him to Melusina and the water, and I am left without him, marooned without my last son, stranded on the riverbank.

My grown son, Thomas Grey, goes the same night. He slips out of the door dressed like a groom into the backstreets of London. We need someone on the outside to hear news and raise our forces. There are hundreds of men loyal to us, and thousands who would fight against the duke. But they must be mustered and organized, and Thomas has to do this. There is no one else left who can. He is twenty-seven. I know I am sending him out to danger, perhaps to his death. “Godspeed,” I say to him. He kneels to me and I put my hand on his head in blessing. “Where will you go?”

“To the safest place in London,” he says with a rueful smile. “A place that loved your husband and will never forgive Duke Richard for betraying him. The only honest business in London.”

“Where d’you mean?”

“The whorehouse,” he says with a grin.

And then he turns into the darkness and is gone.

Next morning, early, Elizabeth brings the little page boy to me. He served us at Windsor, and has agreed to serve us again. Elizabeth holds him by the hand for she is a kind girl, but he smells of the stables, where he has been sleeping. “You will answer to the name of Richard, Duke of York,” I tell him. “People will call you my lord, and sire. You will not correct them. You will not say a word. Just nod.”

“Yes’m,” he mumbles.

“And you will call me Lady Mother,” I say.

“Yes’m.”

“Yes, Lady Mother.”

“Yes, Lady Mother,” he repeats.

“And you will have a bath and put on clean clothes.”

His frightened little face flashes up at me. “No! I can’t bathe!” he protests.

Elizabeth looks aghast. “Anyone will know at once,” she says.

“We’ll say he is ill,” I say. “We’ll say he has a cold or a sore throat. We’ll tie up his jaw with a flannel and put a scarf around his mouth. We’ll tell him to be silent. It’s only for a few days. Just to give us time.”

She nods. “I’ll bathe him,” she says.

“Get Jemma to help you,” I say. “And one of the men will probably have to hold him in the water.”

She finds a smile, but her eyes are shadowed. “Mother, do you really think my uncle the duke would harm his own nephew?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “And that is why I have sent my beloved royal son away from me, and my boy Thomas Grey has to go out into the darkness. I don’t any longer know what the duke might do.”

The serving girl Jemma asks if she can go out on Sunday afternoon to see the Shore whore serve her penance. “To do what?” I ask.

She dips a curtsey, her head bowed low, but she is so desperate to go that she is ready to risk offending me. “I am sorry, ma’am, Your Grace, but she is to walk in the city in her kirtle carrying a lighted taper and everyone is going to see her. She has to do penance for sin, for being a whore. I thought if I came in early every day for the next week you might let me-”

“Elizabeth Shore?”

Her face bobs up. “The notorious whore,” she recites. “The lord protector has ordered that she do public penance for her sins of the flesh.”

“You can go and watch,” I say abruptly. One more gaze in the crowd will make no difference. I think of this young woman who Edward loved, who Hastings loved, walking barefoot in her petticoat, carrying a taper, shielding its flickering flame while people shout abuse or spit on her. Edward would not like this, and for him, if not for her, I would stop it if I could. But there is nothing I can do to protect her. Richard the duke has turned vicious and even a beautiful woman has to suffer for being beloved.

“She is punished for nothing but her looks.” My brother Lionel has been listening at the window for the appreciative murmur of the crowd as she walks around the city boundary. “And because now Richard suspects her of hiding your brother Thomas. He raided her house but he couldn’t find Thomas. She kept him safe, hidden from Gloucester’s men, and then got him out of the way.”

“God bless her for that,” I say.

Lionel smiles. “Apparently, this punishment has gone wrong for Duke Richard anyway. Nobody is speaking ill of her as she walks,” he says. “One of the ferryboat men shouted up at me when I was at the window. He says that the women cry shame on her, shame, and the men just admire her. It’s not every day that they see such a lovely woman in her petticoat. They say she looks like a naked angel, beautiful and fallen.”

I smile. “Well, God bless her anyway, angel or whore.”

My brother the bishop smiles too. “I think her sins were ones of love, not of malice,” he says. “And in these hard days perhaps that is what matters the most.”