I glimpse him only briefly before they slip between the crowded buildings but I have no sense of premonition. Richard seems, as he always has been, so passionately alive, so vital, that there could never be a shadow over him. For a moment I think that perhaps this proves that he will come home in the morning in triumph, and then I think that if he were going out to certain death he would still go out to it with his head up, his shoulders squared, and his footstep light.

* * *

Then we wait. We can hear some shouting from the street and we have the cannon trained on the raggle-taggle army camped in the marshes below the Tower, and pointed north to the streets, but no-one comes within range. The fighting is going on hand-to-hand, in one street after another as the rebels surge forwards and the apprentices and merchants, well armed and defending their homes, push them back. My husband commanding one wing of our forces and Lord Scales commanding another fight their way through the treacherous streets, always heading for the river. The rebels make a stand before Bridgegate where the lanes grow close and narrow, but the soldiers from the Tower push forwards and push on and gradually they yield, falling back over the bridge, a yard at a time. This time the doors of the houses on the bridge are barred and the shutters are over the windows, the tradesmen and merchants on the bridge are battened inside their homes, sick of the disordher asd fearing worse as the slow battle grinds across the river, a yard at a time. The grinning heads of Lord Say and William Crowmer look down from the spikes of the bridge as their murderers are pressed back, one slow pace after another, and the royal army doggedly pushes on.

Forewarned by me, my husband has thick coils of rope and craftsmen in the vanguard of the men, and as soon as they force their way past the anchor points, he has the workmen ringed with a guard as they feverishly replace the ropes that I saw Jack Cade slash with his stolen sword. Desperately the men work, fearing arrows and missiles from the rebel army, as my husband, at the head of his men, fights with his sword in one hand and an axe in another, going forwards and forwards until Cade’s army is thrust to the far side of the bridge, then at a shouted command from my husband and a blast of trumpets, loud above the noise, the royal army breaks off, runs back to its own side, and with a rumble and a roar the drawbridge is raised and my husband leans on his bloody sword, grins at Lord Scales and then looks back along the long twenty-span bridge at the English dead who are being rolled carelessly into the river, and the wounded who are groaning and calling for help.

That night he sits in a deep hot bath in our rooms and I soap the nape of his neck and his strong muscled back as if we were a peasant and his doxy taking their annual bath on Shrove Tuesday. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Pray God the worst of this is over.’