I am silent. It is so near to my own thoughts that I hardly dare to agree.
‘We have not had one peaceful or happy day since she enchanted my son Edward,’ she says. ‘He lost the love of your father for her, he lost the chance of an honourable marriage that would have brought peace between us and France. He threw away the honour of his family by bringing her sturdy brood into our house, and now she will put one of her changeling sons on our throne. She told him to kill George – I know it, I was there as she advised him. Edward would never have decided on the death sentence on his own. It was her spy who killed your sister. And now she plots the death of my last living son, Richard. The day that he falls because of her enchantment she will have taken every single one of my sons.’
I nod. I dare not say anything out loud.
‘Richard is ill,’ she mutters. ‘I swear it is her doing. He says that his shoulder aches and he cannot sleep. What if she is tightening a rope around his heart? We should warn her that if she harms so much as one hair of his head we will kill her boy.’
‘She has two boys,’ I say. ‘She has two chances at the throne. All we would do by killing Prince Edward would be to give the throne to Prince Richard.’
She glances at me in surprise. She did not know I was so hardened. But she did not realise that I watched my sister scream in pain, trying to deliver a baby in a witch’s wind, and die from a witch’s poison. If I ever had a tender heart it has been broken and frightened too often. I too have a son to defend, I have his little cousins. I have a husband who walks up and down the bedroom at night, clutching his sword arm as the pain wakes him from sleep.
‘Richard will have to get the other boy into his keeping,’ she says. ‘We have to hold both the Rivers heirs.’
That evening Richard comes in and greets me and his mother abstractedly. We go through the great hall to dine at the high table and Richard nods grimly as his men cheer him to his place. Everyone knows we are in danger; we feel like a house under siege. When he leans on his right arm as he goes to sit at his place it gives way beneath him and he stumbles and clutches at his shoulder.
‘What is it?’ I whisper urgently.
‘My arm,’ he says. ‘I am losing the strength in it. She is working on me. I know it.’
I hide my fear and smile out over the hall. There will be people here who will report to the queen, hiding in the shadowy walls of sanctuary. They will tell her that her enemy is vulnerable. She is not far away, just down the river in the gloomy chambers below the Abbey of Westminster. I can almost feel her presence in the hall: like a cold diseased breath.
Richard dips his hands in the silver bowl that is presented to him and wipes his hands on the linen cloth. The servers bring out the food from the kitchen, and take the dishes round to all the tables.
‘A bad business today,’ Richard says quietly to me. From the other side his mother leans forwards to listen. ‘I had proof of the plot that I suspected, between Hastings and the queen. His whore was go-between. Morton was in it too. I accused them in council and arrested them.’
‘Well done,’ his mother says at once.
‘Will you have them tried?’ I ask.
He shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says shortly. ‘There was no time. These are the fortunes of war. I had Hastings beheaded at the Tower. Morton I have put in the care of Henry Stafford the Duke of Buckingham. Rotherham and Thomas, Lord Stanley I will hold under suspicion. I have had their homes searched for evidence, I will execute them if I find that they are plotting against me.’
I say not one word as a server offers us a fricassee of chicken. When he has moved on I whisper: ‘Beheaded? William Hastings? Without trial? Just like that?’
His mother flares at me. ‘Just like that!’ she repeats. ‘Why not just like that? You think that the queen demanded a fair trial for my son? You think that George had a fair trial when she called for his death?’
‘No,’ I say, acknowledging the truth of what she says.
‘Well, anyway, it’s done,’ Richard says, breaking into a loaf of white bread. ‘I could not put the prince on the throne with Hastings in league with the queen against me. As soon as he was crowned king and free to choose his advisors they would have taken him from me and put my death warrant before him. He would have signed it too. It is clear to me when I speak to him that he is utterly their boy, he is completely at their beck and call. I shall have to have Anthony Woodville, Richard Grey and Thomas Vaughan, their kinsman, executed too. They would all command the prince against me. When they are dead I will be safe.’ He looks at my aghast face. ‘This is the only way I can crown him,’ he says. ‘I have to destroy his mother’s affinity. I have to make him a king with only one councillor – myself. When they are dead I have to face only her – the plot is broken.’
‘You have to wade through the blood of innocent men,’ I say flatly.
