Her whole life, Cecily has chafed against confinement. Now, in the third week of her lying-in, she wants nothing more than to wait out these long summer days in the sheltered half-light of this curtained room. She was brought here straight from the church. Shriven, blessed, absolved of sin. They led her back over summer fields, where the ring of scythes in the hay crop played counterpoint to the murmuring of priests, who paced beside her, fore and aft, lining her way with prayer. Then under Fotheringhay’s towering barbican they brought her, through the halls, passages and stairways of the castle to this room, which is her world now, till the child comes. At the threshold she hesitated, the priests fell back and only Richard stood beside her. His face was pale, his gaze tender, but his fingers grasped hers tightly and she knew it would hurt him to let her go. She looked to where her feet must take her, where her waiting women moved like shadows in the dim, and at the bed where she will labour, pillow-laden, canopied and wide.

‘Wait,’ he said, and turned to take from waiting arms a drape of soft white wool. His hands unfolded it and there, harnessed with silver and seeded with pearl, was a girdle, corded, thin with age. ‘I begged loan of it from Westminster, from the Abbey. For you.’

She knew then what it was.

He gave into her hands the girdle Christ’s mother wore when she delivered; that fell from her hips as she ascended to Heaven; that was caught in the waiting arms of Thomas, the disciple who doubted. It has rested in England a thousand years. It is the comfort of queens in childbed. It is his prayer for her preservation.

She wondered how he had convinced the monks to lend it, how long he had petitioned, how rich had been his gift of alms. She held it against her face and breathed its age.

‘I will come back to you,’ she told him.

His lips were firm upon her brow. ‘I will wait.’

Beyond the tapestried walls of this room, she knows, the sun is burning its way through the month. The servants, who bring all that is necessary and take away all that is not, whisper at the door of the days’ warmth, of the lack of rain, the weight of work. She knows that the business of the world goes on without her. Men ride into Fotheringhay with news in their satchels and sweat on their backs. Her stewards sit at trestles collecting Lammas Day rents from tenants who begrudge the time it takes to pay them, when the sheep clamour for shearing and the first corn stands up to the cut. Somewhere out there is Richard, ordering it all. Directing his will and hers through the arteries of England, easy in the exercise of power.