‘Don’t call him old, ladies, please,’ laughs Cecily. ‘He has only a handful more years than my husband.’

‘Oh, but he’s not handsome like your lord,’ says Anne, and her women nod, roll their eyes and sigh.

‘I’ve little to say of the Duke of Somerset, but he is not unhandsome.’ It is the single concession she will make for Edmund Beaufort.

They consider his legs. Whether he is tall enough or too tall. They concede that he has kept his hair, that his eyes are large and fine, and that the beard upon his jutting chin is not yet full grey.

‘Sure there must be something that makes queens love him,’ says Maud, the catty one.

‘Our queen?’ asks Cecily, mock surprised.

‘Certain! You’ve seen how he walks behind her with his tongue hanging out?’ Maud demonstrates. ‘Or more than his tongue!’

Gales of laughter.

‘More than his tongue with the old queen, I’m sure,’ says Anne.

This is a scandal so old that Cecily had almost forgotten it; that, in his youth, Edmund Beaufort made a harlot of Dowager Queen Katherine after her royal husband died and before she married that Welsh nobody, Owen Tudor.

‘They say,’ Anne whispers, ‘that she was already carrying Beaufort’s child when she gave Owen her vows.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘My mother, on her honour!’ Hand on heart and eyes heavenward.

‘Sure you were a young maid for such a tale.’ Anne’s mother is ten years dead. ‘You think Edmund Tudor, the King’s half-brother, is Edmund Beaufort’s son?’

‘You see, he even bears his name.’ Anne’s eyes are wide with gleeful horror.

Cecily remembers Edmund Tudor and laughs; a tall man, diffident and handsome, to whom the King shows some favour, but Edmund Beaufort shows none. ‘He has a younger brother, Jasper …?’

‘Who looks so different,’ says Anne.

Cecily concedes that he does.

‘Short, dark and very, very Welsh.’ Sly cat Maud.

More laughter, falling to sighs and shaking of heads.

‘Oh, I don’t know if it’s true,’ says Anne, surrendering breathless into her pillows. ‘But it’s a fine tale.’

‘Well, I’m certain of one thing.’ Maud is determined to bring the laughter back.

‘What?’ asks Anne.

‘That Edmund Beaufort would not scruple to fuck a queen.’

And away they go again, tears in their eyes, hands shielding their blushes, shoulders shaking.

Cecily watches and smiles. She wonders when she became too old to laugh at such things.

28

September 1451–March 1452

Anne’s labour begins on the third day of September. It ends on the fifth, in the small hours before the matins bell, when only priests and women work. The new mother is so tired she can greet her child’s first cry with nothing more than a whimper and trembling fingers that reach out, but have no strength to hold.