The lady smiled softly down on the girl’s head then turned another smile, less loving, more knowing, on him. ‘You’re welcome, Richard. My daughter Cecily says so.’

Richard came, in time, to idolize Cecily’s father. Ralph Neville replaced the uncertainties of a childhood shadowed by treason with the reliable virtues of a well-governed household. Among the young men drawn together under Ralph’s affinity, he found a place within a finely ordered discipline, where loyalty and good endeavour brought rewards he understood. The rules were simple. He could keep them.

He learned soon enough that he’d been brought into Ralph’s household by a business transaction, but as time fostered his understanding of it, he found himself content with its terms. By the mercy of King Henry V, who brought the axe down on his father’s traitorous neck, he retained rights of inheritance to the Earldom of Cambridge and the Dukedom of York. But only a royal affirmation at Richard’s coming of age will turn those rights to reality, and that merciful king is long dead. His brothers, today’s king’s uncles, would have preferred the orphan tipped into a ditch with his father’s headless corpse. Instead, he’s spent his childhood between pillar and post, passed like baggage among men who despise him, unwanted, knocked about, scorned. Until Ralph said to Gloucester, let me have the boy. I’ll make a king’s man of him and give him to my girl.

Richard was married to Cecily within months of his arrival at Raby. He stood beside the grey-eyed girl in the castle’s gilded chapel while the priest muttered and his bride, stiff in her finery, listened earnestly and repeated the words put to her.

‘That’s done then, Richard,’ said Ralph, leaning down to look him in the eye and laying a steadying hand on his shoulder. ‘Serve well, please the King, and you’ll get a dukedom for my daughter.’

He watched over Ralph’s shoulder as his young bride was led away by her nurses. When she turned and smiled at him from the doorway, he felt his heart settle.

Richard has spent the last three years serving his king. Called to court and the King’s company to have his loyalties tested. First in England, now in France.

‘Traitor’s get,’ Gloucester had called him, that first day. ‘Prove me wrong.’

Richard has made it his work to do so.

The dukes of Gloucester and Bedford sit opposite Cecily now, picking at the cooling carcass of the bird and passing a wine jug between them as they talk. Their wives have their heads together at the far end of the table. Cecily doesn’t know if they’re planning a skirmish or comparing the skills of their dressmakers, and doesn’t much care. Like Richard, she’s watching the dukes, wondering what their next move will be and what it might mean for them.