‘A girl,’ Cecily whispers into Anne’s ear as she lays the swaddled babe on her breast. ‘Well done. A fine start. Boys will surely follow.’

But such consolation is needless. The mother’s disappointment is stillborn the moment the red-faced bundle is placed in her arms. In her pale, weary face, eyes startle and widen. It awakens in Cecily an aching envy, the realization that other women feel, no less intensely than she did, that shock of love for the firstborn. That blade that comes from nowhere and sheathes itself in the heart.

Cecily is to be godmother. Later that morning, when she has slept an hour and drowned a raging thirst in watered beer, she takes the child to its father. He looks so pleased you’d swear he’d done the hard work himself. They step to the font together.

‘She wants Isabel,’ she tells him. ‘For her mother.’

Warwick only grins and shrugs. ‘Yes. Isabel,’ he tells the priest.

It would have been Richard, for a boy. It seems not to matter so much, the name you give a girl.

When she returns to Ludlow, she finds her husband gone from home. She calls his marshal and steward to her and is told he’s taken a thousand men into Somerset to quell a dispute between Thomas Courtney, who is Earl of Devon, and William Baron Bonville. Bonville is holed up in Taunton Castle, where Courtney has him under belligerent siege.

‘He went there on the King’s order?’ she asks.

They shuffle their feet and say they believe not.

She has a week to brood on it; then he’s back.

There’s a looseness of limb about him as he strides into hall, like a muscle that’s had the kinks worked out of it. Like a man who wouldn’t say no to another fight. So, when they’re alone, she gives him one.

He’s walking around the table, pretending to take an interest in the food that’s been brought, too restless to sit and sate his appetite.

She looks up from a measured smoothing of her sleeves. ‘I am given to understand that, while I’ve been fostering our alliances, you’ve been making war? This is most unlike you.’

‘Is it? I’ve been making the King’s peace, Cecily. I seem to be the only man in England that wants to do it.’

‘God knows why you must.’

He shrugs. ‘Duty, perhaps. It’s a lonely calling.’

‘And what profit in it for us?’ she barks, walking about the table to come face-to-face with him. ‘Tell me how it adds to our peace to be embroiled in a dispute in the heart of Edmund Beaufort’s dukedom?’ She cocks her head. ‘You do recall he’s Duke of Somerset?’

He doesn’t look at her. ‘The dispute was in Somerset. It was about Cornwall.’

‘Oh, I see. That makes all the difference.’