She leans into the warmth of his hand as he lays it across her face, and feels, too, the cool hardness of his ring with its bull’s blood ruby. She can’t remember ever seeing his hand without it; knows it to be his only talisman of the father he never knew. It was kept for him by the kindness of a servant, who had been there at the end, sent to him when still a boy, before he came to Raby. An uncommon kindness. He told her, once, that it had still had his father’s blood upon it, dark and dry about the stone, when he unwrapped it from its shred of cloth. He had not cleaned it, but, soon enough, under the world’s rubbing, the stain had fallen away.

She thinks, now, that she knows the real root of his anger. He’s remembering her father, who he knew and loved, lying alone in the little church at Staindrop.

‘I go with you, Richard.’

‘And when we are dead, Cecily, where will you go then?’

His eyes when she looks into them are sad and full of questions.

‘With you, Richard. Do you not know? We are a new thing, you and I. We are York.’ She takes his face in her hands, kisses his mouth, careful and soft. ‘Alive or dead, I lie only with you.’

9

June 1441

The English Channel

Little Anne, excited by the rush of wind in sailcloth, turns in her nurse’s arms and, with the lung-bursting squeal of an almost two-year-old, reaches for her mother with grasping fingers.

Cecily turns her shoulder. The sound of her daughter’s pleasure tears a strip from patience already worn thin. ‘Will you take that child away and stop its screeching.’ The disdain in her voice pains her, but really, she cannot bear the child about her just now.

She watches the nurse, who is inured by now to her black moods, draw Anne’s disappointed face under her cloak and bundle unsteadily along the ship’s deck to the steps that lead below. Cecily sighs, stretches her shoulders, then looks up to the forecastle, where Richard stands and his officers gather. She should be with him, she knows. She will go in a moment. For now she wants only to look back; at Portsmouth disappearing from sight, the Solent stretching its silver finger deep into England’s green heart.