She sits back among the cushions and closes her eyes, clenches her jaw against the spinning of her head. She didn’t make it to her bed last night. Indeed, she’s barely slept since that desperate night when Warwick came to say her lord and son were dead. Too much to do, she has told her daughters when they fretted. Too much to think on. But in truth, the sights that come too readily when her mind is unguarded make sleep unwelcome: a paper crown, a broken breast, Edmund’s grey eyes, full of light, as she imagines they were that morning, five days after Christmas, when he rode out behind his father into the winter of his first battle. How might those eyes have looked to Clifford as they fell upon his bloody knife, watched its thin blade arc and fall?

She pulls herself from the thought of it and catches George’s eyes watching her from beneath his heavy brow.

‘Are you well, lady?’ he asks. A question not worth answering.

‘Is all in place?’ They’ve been through it a thousand times, but she needs to hear it again. A thanksgiving at St Paul’s, then to Westminster Hall where Edward will take his seat beneath her gilded suns and swear his royal oath. ‘The Lords stand by to confirm it?’

‘In all their fine array. And the streets between lined with men who will shout their lungs out for him.’

‘Good.’

It must be done quickly for, as soon as might be, Edward must ride north on the Queen’s tail. He must make speed to do the one thing that, in all these years, and at the last, Richard failed to do; to grasp the neck of Lancaster and break it in his hands. Today he will be proclaimed, but not crowned. He will take his oath, but not his ease. He will be offered a kingdom, and he will smile, all graciousness and humility, and say, I thank you, but let me earn it first. And every heart that hears it will be his.

Last night, from Westminster, she sent a messenger, so that Edward might know of their plans before entering the city. A note came back at dawn, scrawled in her son’s own hand. ‘All well, Captain Mother,’ it said. ‘God keep you till I see you.’

She jolts as the carriage comes to a halt. To be seen by him. To see him living. How her eyes hunger for it.