I look at the letter again. In the margin, like a monk illustrating a manuscript, the king has written in his own clerkish hand.

Dear Rivers,

Oblige me by going at once to Plymouth and mustering and organising a force to take to Gascony and a fleet to carry them. You should set sail on 21 September, no later.

Below this the queen has written to me: ‘Jacquetta – Lucky you! Going back to France!’

‘Lucky’ is not how I feel. I look around the yard, at the warm red-brick walls capped with white coping stones that lean against the old chapel, the apple tree bowing low with the weight of the last of the fat fruit, ready for picking, the barn which abuts the granary, filled with hay, and our house set plumb in the middle of it all, warm in the sunshine, peaceful this morning, my children at their lessons. I think that the king is setting my husband a task which will likely be impossible, and that once again I have to go to a new country, a new city, and hope to survive among people who begrudge our very presence.

I try to encourage myself by thinking that Gascony will be beautiful in autumn, that perhaps I will be able to see my brothers and sisters, that winter in Bordeaux will be crisp and bright and clear and that spring will be glorious. But I know that the people of the country will be surly and resentful, the French a constant threat, and we will wait for money from England to pay the soldiers, and end up paying out of our own pocket, while at home there will be endless accusations of failure and even treason. I will have to leave my children behind in England. I don’t want to go, and I don’t want Richard to go either.

I wait for a long time until the royal messenger comes out into the yard, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, sees me, sketches a bow, and waits. ‘You can tell His Grace that my husband and I will leave for Plymouth at once,’ I say. ‘Tell him that we are honoured to serve.’

He smiles ruefully, as if he knows that the service of this king may be an honour but is only a sinecure for the very few favourites who can get away with doing nothing or even fail outright, like Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, who is now Constable of all England, as a reward for running to Kenilworth when there was dangerous work to do in Kent. ‘God save the king,’ he says, and goes off to the stable to find his horses.

‘Amen,’ I respond, thinking that perhaps we should pray that the king is saved from himself.

PLYMOUTH,

AUTUMN 1450–1451

One whole year we live between Grafton, London and Plymouth. One long year while we struggle with the burghers of Plymouth, trying to persuade them to house and equip an invasion fleet. One whole year while my husband assembles a fleet from the privately owned ships of merchants, traders, and the few great lords who keep their own vessels. By mid-winter, months after we were supposed to sail, he has more than eighty boats tied up at the quaysides of Plymouth, Dartmouth, Kingsbridge, and more than three thousand men d. I ded in inns and rooms, cottages and farms, all round Devon and Cornwall: waiting.