He doesn’t go alone. She takes comfort in that. The Earl of Suffolk goes too, and John Talbot, who the French fear more than hellfire. Even her own brother, Richard, Earl of Salisbury, is called down from his keeping of Scotland’s borders. Most welcome is their old friend William de la Pole, who has been back in England a year now and much in her cardinal uncle’s company, and the King’s. They are seasoned commanders all, and Richard – untried in battle, but a strategist of her father’s training – will lead them and a force of three thousand.

They’ve made love, and it’s made her angry again. For Richard had looked for passion, while she could offer only a determined striving that bruised his flesh, wore on her nerves and gave no pleasure to either. She doesn’t believe a child can take hold while her heart is so disquiet and so fears that, for another year at least, her womb will lie empty. She rubs a hand across her belly, digs a fist into the empty cradle of her hips. She miscarried their first child the year they returned from France. Then another. Not three months ago she bled away a third, lying ill and listless at Fotheringhay while Richard was in the south, recruiting soldiers, calling up ordnance and organizing the thousand details necessary when men must cross the sea to fight.

He lies stone-still beside her, but she knows by his breath he doesn’t sleep. She turns her head and sees the shine of his eyes in the light of candles they’d had no time to extinguish as they fell into bed, ripping at each other. He turns too. His face is sad and the fire of her rage is, at last, dampened.

‘I will miss you,’ she confesses.

‘As I will miss you. How will I know what to do with a sea between us?’

‘Write, and I will tell you.’ She smiles and so does he, then reaches out and pulls her close. From her place at his side she draws it out for him. ‘Be a little less reckless than Talbot, a little bolder than Suffolk and you’ll do well enough. Keep my brother close. He has less reason than either of them to hate the French, and only fights battles he knows he can win.’

‘Good advice. I’ll take it.’

She sleeps a little and, when she wakes, the dawn light is sneaking, all unwelcome, through the shutters. Richard is pulling on a robe and padding across the bare floor to the next room, where his squires wait to dress him. She listens to their voices a moment; his softly spoken orders, their steady replies, a splash of water, a chink of steel.

Time to be up.