If Marguerite has not borne a son, at least she has lost none. Cecily has buried two since they came home from France. Days old, each of them; well at evening, dead at dawn. Just like the first. Henry, William and John now. Three small tombs hemmed within Fotheringhay’s white walls; three prayer-swept souls, fledged too soon from their nests of bone. She’s heard the Queen smiled when told of the last. Jacquetta whispered it in confidence, eyes shining with outrage, pausing to see if Cecily would curse, if there would be gossip to carry back.

‘I pray she never suffers so,’ Cecily told her.

Most of all, she abhors the waste of it. And now her belly is set to swell again. Last night Richard asked if she would rather stay behind in England, for the child’s sake, and follow later. Though the journey will be dreadful, she sees little point in that. Tears push against the backs of her eyes as the talk moves on without her. She blinks and chides herself. Foolishness. She is done with crying.

‘For Heaven’s sake, let’s not speak of France,’ she says. ‘Or of Ireland.’

Richard pulls himself up, blinks. ‘Indeed. Surely we have better subjects?’

The weight of finding one falls on Salisbury’s shoulders. He hesitates. Then, drawing on the laugh that seems never far from his throat, he reaches a sword-callused hand to tousle the bright hair of the young man opposite him. ‘Well, I suppose we could toast once again the very great good fortune of my son and heir?’

That’ll do. She nods agreement as the page, keen not to be caught dallying a second time, steps forward to charge glasses and young Richard Neville bats his father’s hand away, smilingly. He’s a man past twenty, could best her brother in a fight if he wanted to, but they’re each as pleased with the other as with themselves. And so alike. And like her father. Don’t think of that either. A generation gone. Father and mother; all of Gaunt’s children. Even the cardinal. He barely outlived Gloucester long enough to crow over his corpse. Dying, he’d said that, were he not certain of God’s mercy, he would be in anguish. Or so his confessor wrote to her. He betrayed no secrets, he said, for her uncle had felt this so keenly he commanded it inscribed upon his tomb.

Was he sorry then, she wonders, in the end? Hard to imagine. She holds her glass to the candle; its light doesn’t penetrate. What does it matter anyway?

Stay with the living, Cecily. So they drink the health of her brother’s son, just as they’ve done all evening. He’s the reason they’re here, after all, the lever that prised her brother from the North like a cockle from its shell.

She holds up her dark-filled glass. ‘To your handsome son.’