Richard starts to say that when he gets the order to sail he will leave me behind, he dare not take me to Bordeaux if the place is going to come under siege. I walk along the protective wall of the harbour and look south to the lands of France that my first husband used to command, and wish that we were both safely home in Grafton. I write to the queen myself, I tell her that we are ready to go to the rescue of Gascony but we can do nothing without money to pay the soldiers, and that while they kick their heels in the farms and villages they complain of their treatment by us, their masters and lords, and the working men and women of Devon see how badly the soldiers and sailors are treated and say that this e suingdom where a man is not rewarded for doing his duty. They mutter that the men of Kent had it right – that this is a king who cannot hold his own lands here or abroad, that he is badly advised. They whisper that Jack Cade called for Richard, Duke of York, to be admitted to the king’s councils and that Jack Cade was right, and died for his belief. They even say – though I never tell her this – that she is a French woman squandering the money that should go to the army so that her own country can seize the land of Gascony, and England be left with nothing in France at all. I beg her to tell her husband to send the order for his fleet to set sail.

Nothing comes.

In July we hear that Bordeaux has fallen to the French. In September the first refugees from Bayonne start to arrive in tattered craft and say that the whole of the duchy of Gascony has been captured by the French while the expedition to save them, commanded by my unhappy husband, waited in the dock at Plymouth, eating the stores and waiting for orders.

We have been living in a little house overlooking the harbour for all of this long year. Richard uses the first-floor room as his headquarters. I go up the narrow stairs, to find him at the small-paned window, looking out at the blue sea, where the wind is blowing briskly towards the coast of France, good sailing weather; but all his fleet is tied up at the quayside.

‘It’s over,’ he says bluntly to me as I quietly stand beside him. I put my hand on his shoulder; there is nothing I can say to comfort him in this, his moment of shame and failure. ‘It is all over, and I did nothing. I am seneschal of nothing. You have been the wife firstly of John Duke of Bedford, a mighty lord, the regent of all of France, and secondly to the seneschal of nothing.’

‘You did all that you were commanded to do,’ I say softly. ‘You held the fleet and the army together, and you were ready to sail. If they had sent the money and the order you would have gone. If they had sent the order alone, you would have gone without the money to pay them. I know that. Everyone knows that. You would have fought unpaid, and the men would have followed you. I don’t doubt that you would have saved Gascony. You had to wait for your orders; that was all. It was not your fault.’