At last, even the noise of his going is over. She bows her head and feels the risen sun beat upon it. She’s nauseous, and there’s a taste on her tongue like old coins. She knows what it means. Her hands find their way to her belly. She’s with child again. Conceived in a green Irish summer when the sun’s heat was still a blessing. God’s blood. What need has she now of another babe to pull on her? She steps down from the wall and finds her boys behind her. Edmund, tow-headed beside his brother’s gold, stands quiet, but Edward is surly, throwing his weight and kicking his heels.

‘I wanted to go with him,’ he accuses. ‘You should have let me.’

Her hand strikes his head faster than a snake. ‘Would you were a man that you could be of such use!’

Striding past him to the tower stair, she hears his scream of shock and outrage, then his tutor’s hushing.

Let him shout, she thinks. Stoke the fire in him. Better angry than weeping.

She is not kept short of news. Every second or third day a messenger comes from Richard. Each is given food, a fresh horse, then sent back with her reply. It is some comfort to hear that, as he rides, more men of his affinity come to swell his numbers.

‘I am thankful for that,’ she writes him.

He replies that, in the towns he passes through, knights and burghers complain of the loss of Normandy – and of the King’s favourites, who ride roughshod over their rights. They are glad he is come and petition him to take up the reins of government, as Cade said he should. ‘It will not make Edmund Beaufort love me,’ he confides.

‘He hates you already,’ she reminds him. ‘And you must wrest him from the King’s side.’

Richard writes that several nobles and not a few royal officers have come. ‘They want to know what I’m about,’ he says. ‘To serve the King’s justice, I tell them, and to clear my name. And, yes, you may send word to the King of that intent.’

Among those who come is her sister Anne’s husband, the Duke of Buckingham.

‘Your sister keeps a good table,’ Richard writes. ‘I am their guest at Maxstoke tonight. I’ve learned much from them of Cade’s rebellion, for Buckingham led Henry’s forces against it and put the rebel’s head on a spike. He confirms that Cade called himself Mortimer. I have assured him I was no part of it.’

Cecily spits venom. The husband of her sister should have known that without asking.