She lets that belief take root in her until the day William Oldhall arrives to tear it out.

He comes to tell them that King Charles has declared war in Normandy, and that Edmund Beaufort has surrendered Rouen into his hands.

22

January–May 1450

They get dry clothes on him, set him by a fire, feed him and let him talk. He’s hale enough for his age, William Oldhall, but it’s a hard journey over the Irish Sea in the teeth of winter. Still, Cecily supposes, he’s endured worse.

He can’t but speak of the old French game, at which he is an accomplished player. One of Richard’s best administrators in his time. Bedford’s before that. In it since he was a lad, in fact, before the glory days of Agincourt. He first saw Rouen back in ’18, when the old King Henry sat his army down at its gates to starve the French out. They exercised their arses through summer to winter, while hunger did its work. By Christmas, there couldn’t have been a cat or dog uneaten in the city, so its commanders expelled the citizens in their thousands, thinking, no doubt, that the soldiery might eke out a little longer on the rats and the mice.

‘They thought we’d give them safe passage, I suppose,’ says William. ‘Not Henry. Had us barricade them into the defence ditches. “Let the fuckers on the walls watch them die,” he said.’ William Oldhall sniffs. ‘We had to watch it too, mind. Saving the French a job, Henry called it. Said they’d be glad not to have the bother of digging graves for the poor bastards after the surrender.’

So young William Oldhall, his belly not much fuller than a Frenchman’s, had tightened his belt and shivered in the mud another month, until the crying stopped, the bodies stilled and the snow came to cover them. Only then had the gates opened, and he’d ridden with Henry’s army into Rouen’s iron-cold streets. He’s a man past sixty now. He understands the price of things.

‘I’m not proud, Richard. I’m not proud.’ He eyes the half-eaten chicken breast on his knife as if it were a French child on a spit, then drops it to the empty plate before him. ‘Wasn’t then. Am not now.’

It’s an old story. Cecily’s heard it before. He’s telling it again because, grim as it is, it’s easier than the new one, the one he told them all in a rush when he rode in from the rain two hours ago. How Edmund Beaufort handed Rouen back to the French without a fight and after a full supper. Then bargained his own safety by giving good men as hostage. Their friend, old soldier Talbot, among them.