She begins her confinement at midsummer and is delivered of a daughter on St Margaret’s Day, which should be propitious, but is not. The babe gasps and struggles a fortnight before dying. Cecily is surprised that grief’s blade still cuts so deep. You’d have thought, by the fifth loss, its edge might be dulled. She had named this one Ursula, for the virgin saint, and intended her for the cloister. But when you offer a gift to God, you must be prepared for Him to take it early.

Richard writes and says he will come to her. She tells him to stay where he is, where there is business to be done that might have better profit than her own.

So, while she recovers and seeks solace in her living children, Richard studies to manage a king who is little more than one.

‘I am learning, I suppose, what Edmund Beaufort knew well enough before me,’ he writes. ‘That the King will let you do most anything if only you spare him the work and give him the credit.’ And yet he speaks of days when the King is capricious, querulous and changeable; when it is necessary to walk as if on knife blades and make few demands. And there are days, too, when he sickens, and wants only his priests and doctors about him.

‘And the Queen?’ Cecily asks.

‘I never see her. And the King sees her little enough, I think. She’s always with the prince.’

‘Don’t imagine she is idle.’

In July, Parliament meets. It does what they need it to do; makes Beaufort’s guilt explicit, exonerates York and his allies, sets the wheels of business moving forward again.

The King, Richard writes, starts pliable, happy to please, but within days grows weary, impatient, complains of pains in his head. ‘So I encouraged him to retire a while and leave business to me. I’ve sent him to Hertford. The Queen with him.’

Cecily sighs. ‘I’d have kept them apart.’

‘What, should I lock her up? Let be, Cecily. He cannot govern his kingdom. Let him at least govern his wife.’

Isn’t it rather the other way around? Idiot.

Come November, when Cecily is back in London and Parliament is to meet again, Henry sends word that he’s too ill to attend and names Richard his lieutenant. The Commons want better than that and say, for God’s sake, make him Protector again and be done with it. The Lords agree, but don’t much like it.