When she sees how his eyes range about the chamber, marking the ear-wagging servants and Richard’s inky secretary, bent over his letters, she steps in. Clapping her hands for attention, she empties the room of all but the three of them and, with a low voice, pitched to soothe, bids Cherbourg’s captain speak his mind.

He addresses himself to Richard. ‘My lord, as I love and serve you, can I ask? Is the Duke of Somerset mad?’

Richard, who till now has thought John Beaufort only vicious, stops his pacing and turns. ‘You may ask. But why would you think it?’

And then the man tells how John Beaufort came to Cherbourg and left without a word to its captain or a courtesy to his office. ‘I sent my man to his camp to greet him and understand his intentions. He was back within the hour, barred from the camp on the duke’s order and his eye blacked for his pains. I went then myself. He kept me waiting four hours and more. It was dark midnight before I was admitted to his tent.’ He shakes his head.

‘And what did you see there?’ Cecily prompts him.

‘I saw a man very deep in his cups. And looking like he’d been there a long time. His captains were about him, like a swaggering mob. Like a dog pack. It was a warm night but he had a fire roaring. It was hotter than hell in there and he but half dressed, sweating like a horse and shivering. I told him I came as your representative.’

‘And how did he answer you?’ Richard asks.

The man’s voice stumbles, he averts his head. ‘He cursed then, and his captains laughed. I asked how I might assist him, and what I might say to my Lord of York of his intentions in France. He came to his feet then, like a fury. He … he put his dagger to my throat and told me straight that his strategy was his secret and he would tell it to no one; that he would skewer any man who tried to discover it. Then he plucked at his clothes as if they scorched him and said that if even his shirt guessed his secret, he would burn it. Then he tore the shirt off and threw it in the fire. And his dagger across the floor after it. “Tell that to the Duke of York,” he said. And he laughed.’ The man shrugs, shakes his head. ‘He was still laughing when I left.’

The room is quiet now.

Cecily looks at Richard. Sees that he’s not shocked to the core as she is. He nods slowly, then goes to his secretary’s desk, rifles among papers, picks up a quill and starts to write.

The captain can bear it no longer. ‘What should I do, my lord?’