Cecily had not known, when she fainted before the Virgin’s face in Walsingham, that she too was with child. She and Richard had made love the night before she set out. It must have been then. Two months later, she knows it, bent double and bleeding on the stairs at Fotheringhay, carried to her bed in the middle of the day. The mess of it is bundled away with the linen, swabbed from the stone steps.

She begs absolution of her confessor. It is surely a sin to be thankful for the loss of God’s gift. But she is too tired to carry – and besides, to what end?

By the time she’s on her feet again, news has crossed the Channel of another death. Old soldier Talbot has fought his way through near seventy years of life. She supposes he would have wanted it to end on a battlefield. But he’d have preferred to be the toast at a victory feast, not salt in the wound of defeat.

He’d returned to France last year when Beaufort ordered him to win back Gascony.

‘For God’s sake why?’ Cecily had asked Richard at the time.

‘Because its people complain that French taxes are higher than English ones,’ he told her. ‘And because Beaufort wants to gainsay those who accuse him of giving up France without a fight.’

‘As long as he doesn’t have to do the fighting,’ Cecily pointed out.

Quite so.

Talbot had gained Bordeaux and most of western Gascony by Christmas, but the French king himself came after him in spring. They tested each other’s wits into the summer until, outnumbered but belligerent, the old man led his little army against a fury of French cannon to relieve Castillon. Those of his men still alive when he fell fled, so that his body was broken as much by their feet as by the French axe that brought his horse down on top of him. His herald found his body next morning, guided by the outstretched arm of the old soldier’s dead son. He could only be certain of him by the gap in his teeth, got long ago in some other fight.

Jacquetta writes that the Queen is ripe as a cherry, and that the court can speak of nothing but the child to come. Still, it seems Marguerite has time to attend to the little things. In July, Richard’s last office, that of steward of royal justice in the south, is granted to Beaufort. And Oldhall, still in sanctuary, is attainted. For treason at Dartford, though he was not there, and for plotting with Cade, who he did not know. His wife is put out of doors and his property, the lifetime’s accumulation of a hardworking man, is a lick and a slurp for a hungry treasury. Impossible to help. Any favour from York would damn him further.