For policy’s sake Isabella sets a high price on Burgundy’s friendship, understanding that Richard will pay much to have only one enemy to fight instead of two. But she deals honestly and speaks plain. When he reminds her how well it suits Burgundy to have the eye of France distracted from her borders by squabbles with England, she has the good grace to concede the point.

Not all of their time is taken up with politics. Evenings are given over to poetry and music, and the measured steps of the basse danse, whose slow turns set jewels shining and bring a candlelit shimmer to silk. By day they walk in Dijon’s vast interiors, where stitched huntsmen, lanced with gold, ride endlessly through tapestried forests, and silver unicorns lie down to sleep in the laps of virgins. In shadowed corridors they are introduced to Isabella’s painted family: fine-nosed Philip and the boy Charles, his ten-year-old curls a riot about his head. They are no more than oil and colour laid on board, but Philip’s face thrums with impatience and his son’s sensuous mouth is moistened, ready to speak. And there, in her gilded frame, is Isabella, half smiling, all knowing, eyes hooded. Then, turning, Cecily sees the lady herself, a breath away – and smiling, just the same.

Cecily has never seen such verisimilitude and cannot help but touch. ‘Your artists tame colour to capture the soul. There’s nothing like this in England.’

Isabella slides past her, a sigh of silk. ‘We should have them set down your beauty, perhaps?’

‘Yes!’ Richard turns on his heel, suddenly delighted.

Cecily smiles, then shakes her head and steps on. She cannot say why, but the thought that men might gaze upon her painted face and thereby divine her thoughts makes her heart trip and her breath come short.

By the end of their visit they are much pleased with one another. Orléans is dedicating verses to three duchesses, only one of them his wife, and the tentative seeds of peace have been sown.

In the four months that follow, those seeds are watered with frequent despatches, addressed always both to York’s duke and his duchess, and responded to in kind.