When she comes at noon to the council chamber, Cecily finds men laughing. Mayor Lee greets her at the door. The scouts, he tells her, have brought word. The Queen has decamped her ragged army, and trailed it and her husband north into the still-falling snow. The only sign she was ever there is an army’s filth left on St John’s Fields and a trudge of tired footprints that wind and weather will cover soon enough.

‘The city is York’s,’ he tells her. ‘We pray you will stay to help us prepare your son’s welcome.’

She accepts the cup of warmed wine he hands her and drinks it down, welcoming the heat it brings to her cold blood, the scent of spice and citrus that floods her head like relief.

49

So little time to make ready. Two days and two nights since Marguerite drifted with the snow. Scant hours to draw out Edward’s claim, to expound upon the arguments she rehearsed before mayor and council: that the Queen is a traitor, the prince a bastard. The King a usurper and breaker of oaths, forsworn, unfit to rule.

She has made it the subject of sermons in every London church. Had it proclaimed from street corners for the common crowd to hear. It has been presented to the guilds, announced in the law courts and the merchant halls. She has spoken herself to Europe’s ambassadors, who learn quickly that, if you want to know what’s happening in England, best come to her door. There can be no one left in London ignorant of Edward’s right to rule, of his descent, through Cecily and Richard and through his long mothers, from the third Edward.

It’s an hour before midnight and she’s been at it since dawn, and the dawn before that. Though her daughters urge her to rest, she says, not yet. All must be ready and she must be sure of it. So they trail behind her to at least make sure she eats a little, to push a cup of wine into her hand between the close of one meeting and the opening of the next. And now, as the city sleeps, they walk with her the shadowed length of Westminster’s great hall. Five hundred echoing steps from its great north door to the black marble table, high on its dais where, for as long as men remember, England’s kings have taken up their dignity and conducted their business. Despite the hour, and a cold so deep it stiffens paint and makes fingers clumsy, the work goes on. Around braziers and in clusters of candlelight, London’s craftsmen work through the night to draw out Edward’s story for all the world to see.