‘Just take care,’ I say, though I know I should tell her to send him away. ‘You will have to be careful all the time, every day of your life. And you cannot see him alone. You must never be alone with him. This cannot go beyond the chevalier and his honourable love for his lady. It cannot go beyond your secret joy. It has to stop here.’

She shakes her head. ‘I have to talk with him,’ she says. ‘I have to be with him.’

‘You cannot. There can be no future for the two of you but shame and disgrace.’

She leaves her mirror and moves to the great bed with the rich golden hangings. She pats it invitingly and slowly I come towards her. ‘Will you draw a card for him?’ she asks. ‘Then we would know the answers. Then we would know what future there might be.’

I shake my head. ‘You know that the king doesn’t like the cards,’ I say. ‘It is forbidden.’

‘Just one card. Just once. So that we might know what is to come. So that I will take care?’

I hesitate, and in a moment she is at the bedroom door and calling for a pack of playing cards. One of the ladies offers to bring them through but the queen takes them at the bedroom door and hands them to me. ‘Go on!’ she says.

Slowly, I take the cards and shuffle them. Of course, we play cards all the time at court; but the feeling of them in my hand as I seek only one, seek to divine the future, is quite different. I hand them to her.

‘Shuffle them. Then cut the cards,’ I say very quietly. ‘And cut them again.’

Her face is entranced. ‘We will foretell his future?’

I shake my head. ‘We cannot foretell his future, he would have to ask for the card, he would have to choose. We can’t do it without him. But we can tell how his life will touch yours. We can see which card shows his feeling for you, and yours for him.’

She nods. ‘I want to know that,’ she whispers longingly. ‘Do you think he loves me, Jacquetta? You have seen him with me. Do you think he loves me?’

‘Spread the cards,’ I say.

She makes a fan of the cards, their bright faces downwards.

‘Now choose.’

Slowly, one finger moving across the painted backs, she muses on her choice, and then she points. ‘This one.’

I turn it over. It is the Falling Tower. The tower of a castle, struck perhaps by lightning, a jagged streak of light flaming into the roof of the tower, the walls going one way, the roof the other. Two little figures fall from the tower to the grass below.

‘What does it mean?’ she whispers. ‘Will he take the tower? Does it mean he will take the kingdom?’

For a moment I cannot understand her meaning. ‘Take the kingdom?’ I repeat in horror. ‘Take the kingdom!’