‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But then you go over the top of the wheel and are falling down again. You are supposed to learn to bear it, whichever happens, as if they were both the same.’

She looks blank. ‘But they are not the same. Victory and eat are not the same. I only want victory.’

I think of Joan and the sign she made with her forefinger, the circle in the air that meant that everything was dust. I make the sign to Margaret. ‘The Wheel of Fortune,’ I say. ‘It is your card: you drew it. You insisted on a reading, and this is the card that you got. It tells us that we all only want victory. We all want to triumph. But we all have to learn to endure what comes. We have to learn to treat misfortune and great fortune with indifference. That is wisdom.’ I look at her pretty, downcast face and see she has little interest in wisdom. ‘But perhaps you will be lucky.’

TITCHFIELD ABBEY, HAMPSHIRE,

SUMMER 1445

At first she is lucky. She meets the king and they like each other on sight – why would they not? He is a handsome boyish man of twenty-three, still somehow fragile, with a delicacy inherited from his French mother, and she is a strong-willed beauty eight years his junior. The Earl of Suffolk, William de la Pole, escorting her to her new country and enchanted with her, predicts that they will make a good match: her fire and passion will be softened by his sweetness; he will learn determination and courage from her.

They are married at the abbey at Titchfield in a service that reflects the young king’s quiet seriousness. I suspect that Margaret would have preferred something more showy and more grand but there is no money for a great wedding, and anyway, the king said that the wedding should be between him, his bride, and God.

Disastrously, his fool of a confessor, Bishop Ayscough, performs the wedding and warns the serious young king that he should not succumb to lust. He warns him that he should only go to the bride’s bed for the purpose of getting heirs to the throne, and not for their pleasure. The boy, who has been cautiously raised by men anxious to protect his innocence, takes the advice like a novice monk and stays away from her bed for a full week. Margaret is not a young woman to deal patiently with such a husband. She summons me to her room the morning after her wedding and drags me into a window bay. ‘He does not like me,’ she whispers urgently. ‘He got up from my bed as soon as everyone had left the room and spent half the night in prayer, and then he crept in beside me like a mouse and slept all the night without so much as touching me. I am as much a maid as ever I was, the wedding was for nothing.’