He moves to kiss her, but they’re both grinning, so that their teeth clash. They laugh, and the hall erupts.

The next morning, on the ebb tide of love, he tells her the real story. What Woodville painted as a daring attack had actually been a desperate gamble. Less colourful, more roughly drawn. Talbot had proposed it because they both knew they couldn’t survive a long stand-off before the walls of Pontoise. Since Cecily was last here, Normandy has been devastated by war, and the land around Pontoise even more so, since the King of France has burned every ear of corn, speared every pig and throttled every chicken left living, to ensure the English fight on empty bellies. The fresh troops Richard had brought to the siege were soon hungry. They saw their unhappy future in the eyes of the men they’d come to relieve; dead on their feet, most of them. Or losing their guts to dysentery.

‘So you took your chance …’ Cecily, loose haired and bare shouldered, shrugs.

‘And fumbled it.’

‘How so? Pontoise is ours.’ She pulls back the covers and, grinning, straddles his waist. ‘If ever I meet the French king I shall wear his bauble, to remind him how my husband trounced him.’

As she leans down to kiss him out of this dark mood he raises his hands to her shoulders, to hold her back. ‘There was more at stake than a bauble, Cecily.’

She sits back against his raised thighs. ‘Then, if we must be serious, tell me.’

He slides his hands down her arms. ‘We had Charles on the run in the days after the siege broke. Talbot came up with a plan to drive him out of his hiding place in Poissy. I’d take up a position just north, intercept him as he made a break for Paris.’

He doesn’t have to tell her that, with the French king and his son captive, England would have its best negotiating position for two decades or more. ‘And?’

‘Talbot raided Poissy, Charles ran and …’ They’re looking hard at each other. It seems he wants to look away, but will not. ‘I misread the road. Too far east. He got past me and on to St Denis.’

‘You had set scouts?’

‘Too few. And not far enough ahead. He’s back in Paris by now.’

She has always told him there is nothing he can tell her that she will not want to hear. This morning she wishes she had not. Or that he had not taken her at her word. She wonders how angry Talbot had been, and whether disappointment tasted as sour in his mouth as it does now in hers.

‘Talbot is still in the field. Will you rejoin him?’

Richard’s eyes are still fixed on hers. ‘No. He has military command. I’ll stay in Rouen for now. I’m here to govern, Cecily.’