He doesn’t mention that his was the most dangerous part; facing the enemy where its defence was strongest, drawing their fire. She feels her breath come shallow, and needs no words from him to conjure the bubbling terror of battling forward, hand over bloody hand. She’s imagined it every night he’s been gone, and feels now the wind of arrows pouring from the walls, feels in her sinews the desperate clamour to cut through any barrier, wood or flesh, to come out of bowshot and into the town. Once through, she’s with him in close-quarter fighting all the way up narrow St Peter’s Street in a press so thick she can hear the breath of each man that tries to kill him, hemmed in by walls and doorways, by carts and horse troughs and anything moveable, piled high to hinder them.

‘Then suddenly we came to the market square and it was mostly over,’ he writes. ‘And there were your brother and nephew, most cheerful, with what was left of the royal forces already running and the first of the townspeople creeping out from their hiding places.’

Folk came, no doubt, to gawp at the redness of noble blood in their streets. Most of it was Edmund Beaufort’s. He lay splayed on his back in a pool of it, arms thrown wide and smashed to angles by hammer blows. She relishes the detail of his torn-off helm, his blood-sodden hair, the slash across his face that had taken an eye, split his nose, smashed his lying teeth and severed half his jaw. She imagines the sword blow that wrought such damage, the swing of it from Warwick’s swaggering shoulder, the crash of blade on bone. Richard’s words paint a bald picture, her imagination gives it colour.

The King, he tells her, had put on armour, though he bore no sword and made no move to fight. ‘By then they’d taken him in at a tanner’s shop where some frightened-half-to-death field surgeon was fussing over a wound in his neck. Stray arrow. Not serious. I’ve brought him to the abbey for proper attention. I told him Beaufort was dead and that’s ended my quarrel. I gave him my loyalty, as I always have, your brother and Warwick the same. He threw his arms about our necks, sobbing, and crying a pardon for all. Dear God, Cecily, what to make of him? So, I will take him to London and put the crown back on his head, but we must have the rule of him now.’