You can only talk for so long and at last you have to rest. Her brother is asleep on his feet when she bids him goodnight at his chamber door. She kisses his grizzled cheek and urges him to sleep well. ‘I wouldn’t want to lose you, you know.’ It’s shaken her, a little, to think she had come close to it.

‘Oh, I’m tough to kill. A wily old badger.’ But he smiles a little, as if pleased to think she’d miss him.

She’s halfway down the corridor when she senses him watching her. She turns and sees he’s leaning against the door jamb, candle in hand. He looks pensive. And old.

‘How did our father have it so easy, hmm?’ he asks. ‘Never saw him tearing up and down the country like this. Died in his bed.’

‘He put a strong man on the throne early, and left him to it. We might all take a lesson from that.’

He grunts and disappears, leaving her alone in the dim-lit corridor. She puts up a hand to shield her candle from the draught of walking and suddenly, in its flame, sees the brilliance of Raby in the old days. The flash of her father’s broad smile as he strode among men who lived by his word. Her mother, queen-like, taking his hand for the dance. Cecily, too, had thought to live as they did. Knows it to be all Richard ever wanted. She’d seen him bewitched by it, that first night in Raby’s hall, looking shy at her over the rim of a spiced cup nursed in chilblained fingers. Her heart shivers at the memory. She holds the candle aloft and walks on.

She finds Richard in his shirt sleeves, looking out from the high window of her chamber to where the campfires of their army burn. More now, since Salisbury is come. Taking her place by his side, she strains her eyes to penetrate the darkness beyond the flames. She wonders where Warwick is. If he, too, faces an assault of swans.

It’s been agreed. They’ll wait a week, then march out – with or without him. Letters will be written to the King. They will appeal for peace, demand only the suppression of the Queen’s men, the restoration of York at the King’s right hand. Cecily thinks it a waste of ink. But Richard insisted and Salisbury concurred.

‘Who will read them?’ she asks now.

‘I have to try, Cecily. Before man and God I must be able to say I did not make war upon my king.’

In the end he hasn’t much choice.

Three days behind Salisbury, Warwick arrives. Three days after that, they ride out. Fifteen thousand men. It’s quiet when they’re gone.