She learns a good deal. Her experience of childbed loss and gain make her indispensable to Warwick’s Anne, whose other companions are young, little more than girls really, with a baby or two in their cradles at best. Cecily’s the eldest of them, with three sons and three daughters, and all the learning that’s come from bringing them into the world. She takes care not to speak of those she’s buried and what she learned from them. She is practical, unsentimental and, when Anne confesses her fear of the pain, she shares her mother’s trick.

‘Give me your forearm,’ she says. And, when Anne does, she wraps her hands around it, grips and twists, one hand forward, one hand back.

The girl’s eyes widen.

‘Don’t cry out,’ she warns, and twists harder. She has strong hands from hard riding on horses Richard picks himself to challenge her. When Anne’s breath comes short, and her eyes close and water, she twists harder still, then lets go. ‘You bore it.’

‘Yes,’ says Anne, rubbing the redness of her skin.

‘Were it twice as hard, could you bear it still?’

‘Yes.’ Defiant.

‘Good,’ says Cecily. ‘It’s only pain. And your will is stronger.’

Later, she sees the girl examining the bruises her fingers have made on her, and smiles to see the pride in her face.

She becomes a confidante and, since the days of confinement are long and tedious, the talk can’t always be of children. In the quiet watches she learns that Anne’s anxiety to put a living child into her husband’s arms is born, in part, from fear that much else she has brought to him is under threat. Cecily can see why she’d worry. It’s surely not her looks or wit he values. Anne’s three half-sisters have long contested her inheritance of the Warwick lands. One of them is married to Beaufort and, on her behalf, he threatens to press their case.

‘If he does, we could lose so much …’ says Anne.

‘But sure, you need not fear; the King has confirmed the inheritance.’

‘Yes, but you know he is changeable.’

‘And Beaufort persuasive,’ Cecily concedes. ‘Yes.’

‘To be at odds with Edmund Beaufort is to be at odds with the King. I would not have us so.’

I would, thinks Cecily. It would make you our ally. It’s time my nephew gave me more than smiles. I would greet an unhappy Warwick with open arms. Better yet if he brought his father, my brother, with him. ‘Well, if anything comes of Beaufort’s efforts, you can always turn to York for support.’

When the mood turns to gossip there’s learning there, too. Anne can at least laugh at Beaufort as much as she fears him. Beaufort the lecher. Beaufort the fornicator. Beaufort the old goat.