‘It’s natural to miss him,’ Cecily tells her. ‘It will get easier.’ She wonders if it will, or if it should. She misses Richard. She missed him all those months he was in Ireland and she was her sister’s prisoner. But, at least then she’d had the comfort of knowing him still living; busy elsewhere, of course, doing things without her. In danger, yes, but breathing still, holding her first in his thoughts as he always has. She tries to imagine being beyond hope of that comfort, but draws her mind back from it as she would her hand from a fire. She’s never been first in anyone’s thoughts but his.

Across the room Anne has laid down her sewing and is crying again, quiet and unobtrusive, pointless. She wants to shake her, but it was this tearful sister who kept her sane through those desperate days, sharing Buckingham’s letters, his snippets of news. So instead she sits beside her, holds her hand while she weeps, and doesn’t call her foolish.

She bites her tongue and does not say, I myself cannot sleep for worry, for I have husband and sons beyond my reach.

Anne is with her the evening Warwick comes with his mother, Alice, who braved the sea to escape the block, but trembles now as she takes Cecily’s hand and stares at her with red, pain-shot eyes.

‘Cecily, you must listen to my son,’ she says. ‘He has news. I’ve come that we might bear it together.’

Cecily stares at her, pushes away her hands as if they carry contagion. ‘Sit down, Alice. I will hear him.’ She turns to Warwick, and it takes all she has to raise her chin and bid him speak.

There’s no swagger in him now. He speaks of an army led by Beaufort, Clifford and that dog, Henry Holland. Of a battle in thick snow outside Wakefield. ‘My father,’ he tells her, ‘my father, your brother, is dead …’ And here he hesitates.

She feels Alice clawing at her sleeve, hears her sobbing and resists the itch to slap her. And there’s Anne, her sister, standing too close, with her hands before her mouth, eyes wide, because she knows what’s coming; knows as well as Cecily does herself.

‘Richard?’

Warwick gulps, looks away.

‘Say it.’ She clenches her fists, feels nails stinging palms. ‘Richard. Edmund. Say it. Dead.’

He nods. ‘Yes.’