Then, just before the year’s turn, here comes a bevy of northern lords with eight thousand men. They swear they’ll fight for York. Then turn their coats for Lancaster.

‘Your lord felt with them we’d enough to get the job done,’ one old soldier tells her through new gaps in his teeth. ‘They marched out with us, shoulder to shoulder. Then fell on us like dogs.’

She takes those lords’ names, crafts a curse for each. And one for Richard, who was fool enough to trust them.

At last a man comes who can tell her how Richard died in the first hour of the battle, his horse cut from under him in the charge, a poleaxe blow that caught him as he fell, buckled his armour and made a cave of his chest. Another saw, much later and at Marguerite’s order, the despoiling of his body, the severing of his head, the mockery of a paper crown and the hammering nail that fixed it to his skull. He tells her how Marguerite laughed, and let Henry Beaufort kiss her hand. And how the Queen’s infant son dabbled his fingers in her husband’s blood.

The man who speaks of Edmund shakes so hard he rattles, and weeps when he’s done. Edmund, who always ran so fast, couldn’t outrun the horsemen who pursued him in the rout. They brought him, bloodied but breathing and still in charge of himself, to Clifford, who stood him on Wakefield Bridge, called him York’s cub and cut his throat with a bodkin.

‘Was he afraid?’ she asks the trembling squire.

He looks at her as if he doubts her sanity, and lacks the forethought to lie. ‘He was a green boy, lady. He was scared witless.’

She welcomes the blow, gives him money for his pains. It is part of her penance, to hear the worst and bear it. That night, at her prayers, she makes his words her Ave. A green boy, a cut throat, York’s cub. Edmund. Grey-eyed, loose-limbed Edmund. The son she did not choose. She lights candles for his soul, holds her fingers to their flames and begs forgiveness. What use? She could sear the flesh from her bones, she thinks, set all the world a-fire, it would never be enough.

There’s news that feeds her anger and news that feeds her intelligence. With Warwick she questions every man for the names and numbers of their enemies, for signs of their intentions, hints of where they’ll strike. Piece by piece they have it. While Beaufort slaughtered Cecily’s menfolk at Wakefield, Marguerite sold England to the Scots. In return for a mercenary army she has given the border town of Berwick, and a marriage with her son that will make Scotland’s daughter England’s future queen.