‘Are you missing Father already?’ she asks gently.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know I am a soldier’s wife and I should be ready to let him go but each time it is hard and I think that it gets harder, not easier.’

‘Can you foretell his future?’ she asks quietly. ‘Can’t you see that he will come home safely? I am certain this time he will be safe. I just know it.’

I turn and look at her. ‘Elizabeth, can you foresee things at will?’

She gives a little shrug of the shoulders. ‘I’m not sure,’ she says. ‘I don’t know.’

For a moment I am back in that hot summer, in the chamber of my great-aunt Jehanne as she showed me the cards and gave me the bracelet of charms, and told me the story of the women of our family.

‘It’s not something that I would press on you,’ I say. ‘It is a burden as well as a gift. And these are not the times for it.’

‘I don’t think you can press it on me,’ she replies thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think it is a gift you can give – is it? I just sometimes have a sense of things. At Groby, there is a corner, a cloister by the chapel, and when I walk there I can see someone, a woman, almost a ghost of a woman; she stands there and she has her head on one side as if she is listening for me, she waits almost as if she is looking for me. But there is no-one there really.’

‘You know the stories of our family,’ I say.

She gives a gurgle of laughter. ‘It is me who tells the story of Melusina every night to the little ones,’ she reminds me. ‘They love it, and I love it.’

‘You know that some of the women of our family have inherited gifts from Melusina. Gifts of the Sight.’

She nods.

‘My great-aunt Jehanne taught me some ways to use the gift, and then my lord the Duke of Bedford had me work with his alchemists, and sent a woman to teach me about herbs.’

‘What did you do with alchemists?’ Like any child she is fascinated by forbidden magic. The skill with herbs is too ordinary for her, she has learned it in my still room. She wants to know about dark arts.

‘I read the books with them, sometimes I stirred a mixture or poured it out to cool.’ I am remembering the forge in the inner courtyard and the great room like a vast kitchen in the wing of the house where they heated and cooled the liquor and stones. ‘And my lord had a great mirror where he wanted me to scry – to see the future. He wanted to see the future of the English lands in France.’ I make a little gesture. ‘I am glad now that I could not see clearly. It would have broken his heart, I think. I thought I failed him at the time but now I think I served him best by not seeing.’