With Oldhall in place that’s easily done. But when Parliament speaks, the King dithers. Says he will. Says he won’t.

‘Until the Queen makes up his mind for him,’ writes Richard. ‘I told him, he must be seen to judge fairly. To listen to his people’s petitions as God listens to his.’

‘You sound like Jack Cade,’ Marguerite had said. ‘These men are our friends and we do not see that they have wronged us. Should we punish them to satisfy peasants who rose in rebellion against God’s anointed? Who, by the way, my Lord of York, called on your name, when they did so.’

Cecily grimaces as she reads.

The King smiled. ‘My queen has the right of it, of course. What good Christian man would so betray his friends?’

I should have thrown that chit of a girl into the Seine when I had the chance, thinks Cecily, tapping her finger against the page. But Marguerite is a girl no longer. She is a queen now, French and childless. She too steps on swords.

‘It doesn’t help that men still call out for me,’ Richard writes. ‘In London, Kent and across the country. Never have voices raised in support done a man such harm.’

Christmas comes, but brings little cheer. Richard’s gift of news is that Edmund Beaufort struts like a cock through Westminster once again.

‘The Queen,’ he writes, ‘argued that, since I have quelled the city’s riots, it was safe for him to return. She is all smiles, of course, and the King ever in their company.’

If the Queen is happy, no one else is. Parliament is slighted no less than Richard, and men who’d hoped for justice with Beaufort gone are outraged by his return. By January, cries of discontent sound louder than ever. From Kent comes the threat of fresh rebellion.

‘Let me ride out to quell it,’ said Richard.

‘That would hardly do,’ responded the Queen. ‘Since the rebels call out to you as to their saviour.’

So Beaufort rode into Kent to reap a harvest of heads. And the King went with him to see it done.

‘That young bastard Henry Holland, too,’ writes Richard. ‘God grant our daughter grows to be a woman strong enough to curb him. She’s yours, so I must believe she will.’

Through the misery of February and March, as Cecily’s belly swells and her head aches, Richard’s letters bring only agitation. He is isolated again, watched, spied upon, suspected. He prowls the fringes of the court, waiting in corridors, hoping for a turn in a tide that runs against him.

The King reopens Parliament in May.