The first cheers seem low, hesitant, then they rise, jubilant and soaring, drowning all other sound. Cecily imagines Alice, resplendent, waving from her chariot as she passes through the gates and into the city streets.

Marguerite sighs and lets her eyes fall closed.

Cecily smiles down on her, gives her hand a single squeeze. ‘There. You see?’

In three days Marguerite is back on her feet. By Good Friday, well enough to tread, barefoot and solemn, to the castle’s chapel for Tenebrae where, in the cold dark before dawn, Christ’s passion is remembered.

Kneeling beside her, Cecily curls icy toes into the furred lining of her gown and watches from beneath lowered lashes. Marguerite’s feet, she imagines, do not scorn cold stone as hers do, nor does she seem distracted from her prayers. Perhaps Henry will find in her a match for his own fervour. An anchor for his wandering will.

That would be a blessing.

She hides a grin in her cloak’s collar, helped by a growing darkness. The service is ending. The choir’s voices, and the chapel’s many candles, are extinguished, one by one. Nothing remains but a single flame, cupped in the priest’s hands; reminder to a sorrowing world that even the darkest times can be lived through.

‘Thanks be to God for his mercy,’ Marguerite whispers in her sibilant French.

Cecily reins in her thoughts and adds, ‘Amen.’

Save for the feasts of Easter, when Marguerite is shown to the city and introduced to its lords, the days that follow are spent quietly. No ostentatious celebrations, no formal audiences. ‘You’ll have more than you’ll ever want of all that when you get to England,’ Cecily tells her. ‘Take time now to gather your strength.’

The girl seems content to do so. In the mornings they ride the riverbanks, where the trees are hung with hoar frost and long winter grasses splinter against their horses’ legs. They visit the white-painted abbeys of Saint Ouen and Saint George, where Marguerite asks time alone to pray. Cecily does not know how she herself should speak to God of Marguerite. What she should ask for. Happiness would be conventional, she supposes. Fertility. But the word that comes most readily to her lips is endurance.