When Buckingham came for her, she had nothing but the clothes she stood in. They were filthy and stank, and in them she travelled four days in a lurching coach at the rear of his army to Maxstoke, her sister’s home in the Midlands. There is one mercy. As they were brought from the tower to the castle ward, Annette appeared from somewhere, bruised and battered, but otherwise hale, and begged leave of the duke to travel with her mistress.

In the quiet of the carriage Cecily grasped for her hand. ‘Are you much hurt?’

‘No more than you see.’

‘And Jane. Did you …?’

Only a shake of her head, a fluttering hand that says, ask no more. ‘I have bought prayers.’

Annette cares for the children now, beds down each night beside Dickon who, she tells his mother, cries bitterly in his sleep. Cecily can’t think of that. She weeps at night herself. By day she must be calm and think straight. Parliament has opened at Coventry and she is called before it.

When the time comes, she travels with her sister, leaving her children with Annette, safe, she hopes, behind Maxstoke’s red stone walls, its broad moat. She’s not allowed a horse and Buckingham’s men ride close about the carriage.

‘What do they think I’ll do,’ she asks, ‘run?’

‘Well, your husband did,’ Anne reminds her.

And because it is so ludicrous, they laugh, gulping. Cecily reaches out and takes Anne’s hand, squeezes it. She knows her sister has prevailed upon her husband to speak to the King on her behalf. To counsel him towards mercy. He’s a fair man, Buckingham, able to see both sides of an argument, tired of being pulled in two directions.

That night, in their Coventry lodgings, he tells her, in plain language but avoiding her eye, of the ruin that is upon her. The attainder that Parliament has passed against Richard and her sons, against Salisbury and Warwick, strips her of everything. Land and titles, property and rights.

She nods. It’s as she expected and what she has steeled herself against.

‘I could do nothing for your brother’s wife,’ he tells her. ‘She’s declared traitor, too. Men have been sent north to arrest her.’

That’s ice in her belly. ‘How so?’

‘Some trumped-up nonsense that she drove your brother to rebel.’

This is a new kind of fear. She feels for a moment the thinness of her neck, the horror of laying it down. ‘Am I also in such danger?’

‘Do you think you’d be here with us if you were?’

‘Then why Alice and not Cecily?’ her sister asks.

A moment’s thought and she doesn’t need Buckingham to give her the answer. ‘Because our brother holds the earldom of Salisbury in right of his wife.’

‘Aye, and rich lands along with it.’ Buckingham nods.

‘And Marguerite wants them.’

‘The Crown wants them.’

‘Same thing.’