He does not come. The garrison is under pressure from the Duke of Burgundy, whose forces are mustered nearby; they fear he may set a siege. Although Richard is just across the narrow seas and Calais is only a day’s sail away, it feels as if we have been parted for a long time, and that he is far away.

In the nursery one night, while the wet nurse is having her dinner in the hall below, I sit with my new baby and look at her sleeping in the cradle and I take my great-aunt’s cards from the hanging pocket ag rt, and shuffle them, cut them, and take the one card and put it on the little embroidered blanket in the baby’s crib. I want to know when I will see Richard again, I want to know what the future holds for me.

It is the Fool, a peasant man with a stick over his shoulder, a gaping bag at the end of it, without a fortune now but with hopes. In his other hand he carries a stick to help him stride out on the road ahead. A dog pulls at his breeches, his lowly nature which draws him back from his destiny; but he goes onwards. He keeps trying. It is a card that tells the reader to set off in hope, that great things can be achieved, that one should walk out filled with courage, even if one is a fool to hope. But what catches my eye is the white rose he wears in his cap. I sit for a long time, the card in my hand, wondering what it means to be an adventurer with a white rose in your cap.

When I return to court I ask the queen if Richard may come home but she and the king are distracted by news of trouble, petty uprisings and discontents in all the counties around London. They are the old complaints, stated all over again. Jack Cade was hunted down to his death, but his questions were never answered, and his demands – for justice, for the law, for fair taxation and an end to the court favourites – go on and on. The men of Kent turn out for another unnamed captain, saying that the king must dismiss his favourites who steal the royal fortune and give him bad advice, the men of Warwickshire take up arms, saying that Jack Cade is still alive and will lead them. The king, deaf to all complaints against him, sets out on a summer progress determined to try men for treason and, wherever he goes, Edmund Beaufort the Duke of Somerset rides alongside, a companion and confidant, and sits beside the king when they go south and west to Exeter. Together they pass the death sentence on men who have done nothing more than complain of the duke’s influence.

The men here in the dock are the very ones who complained of having troops quartered on them for a year, the very ones who said that we should go to Gascony and reclaim it, who raged against the waste and the shame of the army on the quayside of Plymouth. They saw, as none of this court will ever see, the spendthrift folly of creating an army and then leaving it with nothing to do. Now they will die for saying that. They said nothing more than Richard and I said to each other when the sailors wore out their patience and the soldiers ate up all the stores. But these men said it aloud when spies were listening and now they will die, for the king’s forgiving nature spins on its axis and suddenly turns to reveal its dark side and is sour.