The girls tap on the door and come into the room in a flurry, with rose petals for the bed and the jug of wedding ale and a bowl of scented water for her to wash with and her linen gown, and I help her get ready, and when the men come in, boisterous and drunk, she is lying in her bed like a chaste little angel. My husband and Lord Grey help John in beside her and he blushes furiously, like a boy, though he is twenty-one; and I smile as if I am wholly happy; and I wonder what it is that stops my heart in fear for the two of them.

In two days we go back to our own house at Grafton, and I never tell Elizabeth, or anyone, that I did indeed read the cards for her, the very day that Lady Grey wrote to me to ask what dowry Elizabeth might bring to the marriage. I sat at the table looking out over the water meadow and the dairy, certain of her happiness, and took the cards in my hand. I turned over three, chosen at random, and all three were blank.

The card-maker had put three spare cards in the pack when he first painted the pictures, three cards just like the others with brightly coloured backs but nothing on the front, spares for use in another game. And it was the three cards with nothing to say which came to my hand when I went to foresee Elizabeth’s future with John Grey. I had hoped to see prosperity and children, grandchildren and a rise in the world, but the cards were empty of anything. There was no future that I could see, for Elizabeth and John Grey: no future for them at all.

PALACE OF PLACENTIA, GREENWICH, LONDON,

CHRISTMAS 1452

Richard and I attend the court at Greenwich for Christmas and find the festivities and the hunts and the music and the dancing all under the command of Edmund Beaufort, who is such a centre of the happiness of the court that he is almost a king himself. He makes much of Richard, recommending him to the king as the man certain to hold Calais for us, and often takes him aside to discuss how an English expeition might force its way out of the Calais lands into Normandy once more. Richard follows his usual rule of fealty and loyalty to his commander, and I say nothing about the way that the queen’s eyes follow them when they talk together. But I know I have to speak to her again.

I am forced to speak to her, driven to it, by a sense of duty. I almost smile to feel so bound; for I know this is the influence of my first husband, John, Duke of Bedford. He never avoided a difficult duty in his life and I feel as if he has laid on me the obligation to serve England’s queen even if it means challenging her behaviour and calling her to account.