His back is to her, his attention all before him; on the armour that will go with him tomorrow when he rides out against the traitor MacGeoghegan. It hangs empty on its stand, a silvered ghost of him. Already it has been sanded and oiled, polished by his armourer. All three of his body squires have, in their duty, checked every buckle, rivet and joint. But Richard is meticulous, so here he is, as the slow summer evening softens the light in his chamber, tugging at straps, feeling for flaws, testing in his hands the slide of plate he will rely on for safety and speed.

She is all impatience. ‘Will you let it be? I checked it myself this afternoon.’

He looks over his shoulder, gives a smile she doesn’t return.

‘And you know better than to ask what women know of such things.’

‘I’m sure you were very thorough.’

‘I was.’ She does not say that, her inspection done, she’d signed the cross at every known weak point; where helm and gorget meet at the neck, where pauldron, couter and poleyn shelter shoulder, elbow and knee. He needn’t know that she had set her lips against the arced breastplate and whispered the Ave, to put his heart in the Queen of Heaven’s keeping.

‘You seem ready enough to put your neck in MacGeoghegan’s noose.’

‘I’m rather hoping to put his in mine. I cannot deal so forthrightly with the King of England.’

‘The king who has yet to pay us and doesn’t reply to our letters?’

It has become pressing this last month, the lack of money. There’s insurrection in Meath. The native chief MacGeoghegan has torched the town of Ramor and the villages about it. It is banditry and must be snuffed out. But you need coin to put men on the march, and the English lords of Ireland, who Richard has called on for a levy, begin to whisper that their Lord Lieutenant may have boasted of royal support he doesn’t have. Some of them have a taste for banditry themselves.

He has written to Lord Saye, England’s Treasurer, to remind him of payments overdue. He has written to the King. Cecily herself has deigned to respectfully ask the Queen to intercede with her husband the King on their behalf.

They’ve received assurances of good faith – of love, even – but no money.

Richard takes up his sword, runs an oiled cloth down its steel. But he does not speak.

‘We’ll get nothing from Henry until we stand before him with our hands out,’ she complains. There is tension in every line of his body, but she chooses to ignore it. ‘I wonder you still believe, after so many years and against all the evidence, that your good service will be rewarded.’