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Margaret asked that you go with her. I had intended to permit it, but no longer. I wish you to remain in England.”

    We both stared at him. I had not known about the Lady Margaret’s request. Now I did not know what to say. Indeed, I hesitated to say anything at all.
    “Jane must accompany me,” Margaret objected. “I cannot do without her.”
    “You will have to,” her father said. “Your sister needs her more. Mary is eight years old, the same age Jane was when her mother died. If I could keep you here, Margaret, I would, but you needs must go to Scotland. In your place, Jane must stay.”
    “In my place ?” Margaret looked offended. “Jane is no princess!”
    The king sighed and glanced again at me. A crafty look came into his pale eyes. “What say you, Jane? Do you wish to go to Scotland with Margaret or stay here with Mary?”
    He could command that I stay, no matter what I said. I thought of Mary. I’d heard her crying for her mother in the night and my heart had gone out to her. I looked at Margaret—solid, sturdy Margaret who knew her own mind even at the tender age of thirteen. She did not need me…and Mary did.
    “I will stay here,” I said.
    “You will not regret your decision.” The king looked pleased.
    After he left, the Lady Margaret stared at me with cold, unforgiving eyes. With a wrenching sense of loss, I knew our friendship was at an end.
    “I always knew our father loved Mary best,” she said when I started to speak, “but I thought you would be loyal.”
    “The king of Scots may not permit you to keep any of your household,” I reminded her. Although James IV had agreed to let her bring a goodly number of English men and women with her, she had been warned of the possibility that he would dismiss most of them after she arrived in Scotland.

    “I am a princess of England,” Margaret declared. “I shall do as I like.”
    After Margaret Tudor left England for Scotland, I tried not to think about her. My “sister,” as Will Compton would have it, had stopped speaking to me—in either English or French—well before her departure.
    I devoted myself to the Lady Mary and was pleased when, over the course of the next two years, she began to turn to me for advice. I became her “dearest Jane,” but I never let myself forget how quickly that might change. When she asked for honesty, I gave her only as much as I thought she wanted to hear.
     
    I CELEBRATED MY sixteenth birthday at Pleasure Palace in January of the twentieth year of the reign of King Henry the VII. By then I had lived in England for some seven and a half years and, while the Lady Mary feared thunderstorms, I had developed a liking for the wild weather that sometimes battered the English Isles at that time of year.
    For three long days and nights in the middle of the month, a gale that had swept across the Narrow Seas and into the south of England raged unchecked. It uprooted trees and sheered tiles off rooftops. From the Lady Mary’s apartments, which looked out upon a garden with a fountain, an apple orchard, and part of the two-hundred-acre park her father had enclosed for hunting, I was able to watch branches waving madly but could see little else.
    Curiosity finally drew me to the opposite side of the palace, to the passageway beneath the king’s apartments where we had once rolled hoops. There the windows overlooked the rapidly rising waters of the Thames. From that vantage point I had a clear view of a surface that had been frozen solid only a few days earlier. Now the river had overflowed its banks, flooding the lowest-lying areas. Inawe, I watched stairs designed to give access to Greenwich Palace at any stage of the tide vanish beneath the roiling water.
    I was so intent upon the sight that I did not at once realize I was no longer alone. I heard footfalls approaching and then a man spoke.
    “Why, it is Mistress Popyncourt,” said Master Charles Brandon, stopping beside me.
    I recognized him at once. He