‘Soon the head will settle low between your hips,’ Anne says. ‘And then, well, then it will be only a few days at most.’

Cecily is sure this is right. She knows the child is coming, swimming towards her through the dark. She closes her eyes again, opens, and lets them rest upon the girdle, where it hangs on the wall before her bed. ‘Is it true, do you think, that the Virgin suffered no birth pains?’

‘’Tis certain, for she was without sin.’

‘My confessor says they were kept for her till Golgotha, and there she felt their terror a thousand fold.’

She has thought much on this since the child quickened and came alive for her. She doesn’t much fear pain. She has tested it; held a finger against the candle flame, pricked her arms with needles, twisted the flesh of her thighs in her fists till her breath came short and fast. ‘Take the greatest of these pains and imagine them doubled. Then double them again. If you can bear that, you can bear a child.’ Her mother’s advice is always practical.

No. Her greatest fear is loss. For to leave this room with nothing will break her. Or if at some other time, however far distant, someone takes this child’s life from her, she will tear out their heart and devour it warm. She will dig out their tongue by its root. She will blind their eyes. Break their bones. She will drink their blood. She sees herself doing these things in her dreams and wakes in horror. She prays to St Margaret, who was eaten by a dragon and cast up again alive, who intercedes for all women in childbirth that they may be delivered, just as she was.

Three days later and the child is low in her belly. She wants to walk but her legs are splayed and the weight presses till she thinks she will fall, so instead she crouches on the carpeted floor and lets the heft of her body hang suspended from her spine. All day the ache in her back grows. Then, as night comes, the ache becomes pain that rises in her like a wave, as if the oceans of the world are caught up within her.

The midwives are urgent with advice. Walk now. Sit a while. Come back to the bed.

She wants to strike them. She shakes off their hands. Her mother has sent a stone of pain-easing green jasper banded with white like the flesh of her thigh. They rub it against her flanks, then tie it in a bag and cord it about her waist. They take down the girdle from its wall and lay it against her body. They send word out into the world of the castle that the duchess’s time is come, and the priests in the chapel and the canons of the Church must keep vigil.