She speaks, they write and, in the dark before dawn, men are pulled from their beds and put into saddle. A dozen riders by a dozen routes. They carry both summons and warning. ‘Edward, your father and brother are dead. Come south and avenge them. But guard your life. You are the King’s heir now.’

The last footfall is gone from the stair. She has done all she can tonight. But for one thing. She sends everyone away and calls for Annette. ‘You must pray for him, Annette,’ she urges, drawing her into the room. ‘From the day of his birth your prayers have bound him to life.’

‘What shall I pray?’

‘That he will live. That he will come to me. That wrath will conquer his grief but not his reason.’ He’s eighteen, still green, and all that stands, now, between her and destruction.

Annette nods. Her eyes are clear, her voice calm, her hand steady and cool against her mistress’s cheek. ‘I will pray if you will rest.’

So she lets the good nurse take the clothes from her body and lay her in her bed. When she is given a cup, she drinks it. Then she lies quiet and follows the words of the Ave, as certain as rosary beads, as familiar as her name, a path through the cold and the darkness to the hope of her fire-born son.

46

In the days that follow, while prayers travel west, news leaks south of Wakefield and its bloody aftermath. She’ll not shrink from it, nor consent to hear it second-hand or sifted. She calls each witness to recount his tale in person, to give details that feed her resolve.

They tell of a hard march. Of weather that turned so hard and so vicious that even the North men among them said they’d never seen its match. Of a scourge of snow storms that filled the valleys and made the high moors nigh impassable, while ice-laden winds froze their water in its skins and cracked the leather of their harness. They lament a belly-gripping scarcity of provision in a country laid waste by an enemy greater in number and better prepared; that harried and nipped at their heels, pushing for a fight they seemed certain to win. With Christmas coming on Richard holed them up in his castle at Sandal. Lean pickings, but a safe enough place to sit out the weather and wait for Edward to square the odds with his reinforcements from Wales. She hears how the waiting chafed on him. How they kept a cold Christmas, with little cheer and poor fires and men sleeping in draughty corridors or out under canvas for want of room, but every day her lord and her son coming among them, telling them to take heart and hold on.