She takes Richard’s face in her hands; its skin is cold and clammy, his lips drawn back from his teeth. ‘Can we win?’ she asks him. She sees the shame in his eyes.

But his answers are always honest. ‘No.’

‘Then you must run.’

‘No!’ Edward is on his feet again.

‘Sit down!’ She reaches for Warwick, pulls his arm. ‘You, to Calais. And your father with you. You can hold out there, can’t you? You’ve ships and a garrison, haven’t you?’

Her brother catches her drift. ‘No more defensible place in all the world,’ he assures her.

She turns to Richard again. ‘You, to Ireland. We’ve friends there still, haven’t we? Get yourself an Irish army.’

He hesitates.

‘God’s blood, Richard, if you run today you can fight tomorrow. But by all means stay, if you want to follow your father.’

That puts metal in him. ‘What about you?’

They’ll be heading across country with nothing that can’t be stuffed in a saddle bag. Impossible to take a woman and three children. ‘I’ll stay safe enough.’ She looks towards the fire, where Margaret has her thin arms about George and Dickon. ‘Do you think I’ll let Marguerite murder my children?’

‘I know who I’d back in a fight,’ says Edward.

‘Alright.’ Richard is moving again. ‘Edward, Edmund, you’re with me.’

They nod, stand straighter.

Then, ‘No,’ says Cecily. ‘Not both of York’s heirs together.’

They cast about, see the logic but don’t want to part.

‘We must go now if we’re going,’ her brother hisses.

The choice must be hers, but how can she make it? She can’t believe her sons might die, not now with her hands on their breasts and their living hearts beneath. But flesh is soft and swords sharp and all look to her for an answer and there’s no time. Dear God, nowhere is safe.

She thinks of her brother outwitting the Queen’s army not a month ago at Blore Heath, first to enter the streets at St Albans, holding the North and always winning. She looks from him to Richard, and knows.

She clenches her fists against her sons’ leather gambesons and pushes them both away. ‘Edward, go with your uncle.’

40

She’s pushed them away and they’re gone. Horses’ hooves muffled by sacking, skirting the walls to the postern gate, down to the wooden bridge that crosses the Teme at Dinham. Then to saddle, and a mad gallop into the shadowed hills of Wales. She knows the routes they’ll take, has hunted them often enough. They’ll part before morning, if they live that long. Richard and Edmund for the Welsh coast, Edward and the others south into Devon to find a ship for France. They’re good riders, her sons. Edward on that big bay mare of his, deep-winded and fast.