‘Our first piece of good news,’ Cecily tells Warwick, who looks, for a moment, bewildered. ‘Think, man. There’s only one thing the English hate more than the French and that’s the Scots. Now our French queen brings a Scottish army against us. Surely we can make something of that.’

They can. They spread the word, and the numbers in Warwick’s small army, Richard’s planned shield wall for London, begin to swell.

Still no word of Edward but, daily now, rumours come of Marguerite’s bloody progress south. Those who flee her path say she rides armoured at the head of her army, her son saddled before her, flanked by Beaufort and Percy, Henry Holland and the butcher Clifford. They cut a swathe of destruction the length of England; houses raided, churches robbed, women raped. Men are tortured to reveal their wealth; killed if they won’t give it up, killed anyway when they do. As Peterborough, Huntingdon and Royston fall, London’s citizens start to whisper in the street that, when Marguerite comes, they must throw open the gates to her and beg mercy. The mayor sends to Warwick to say, ‘What will you do?’ And still, still, no word of Edward.

They can wait no longer. Warwick has nine thousand men and leads them north.

‘It’s less than the Queen has,’ Cecily points out to him.

‘They’re fresh, though,’ he says, reaching for his swagger, his bravado. ‘They haven’t marched three hundred miles in winter.’ He plucks the King from his prayers and takes him with them. ‘For morale,’ he says. ‘Let our men see that they fight for God’s anointed under a royal standard, against a foreign queen and a disinherited bastard.’

For God’s sake, don’t lose him, she thinks.

She would have sent for William Oldhall, but his heart gave out as this winter came in, still attainted, still in sanctuary, pared from the world by his loyalty to York. So it’s one of his men who answers her desperate call at dead of night. John Skelton, who Oldhall had the raising of and loved like a son. He stands now in her little boys’ chamber, cloaked for travel, bags across his shoulder laden with her coin.

‘Can I trust you?’ she demands, as she hurries Dickon, still half asleep, into a thick woollen surcoat, and Annette does the same for George. The bull’s blood ruby is on a cord about Dickon’s neck. She tucks it deep, pats it down.

‘More than most men,’ he tells her.