In the warm shelter of the cloak his hand goes to my belly.

‘You are a ruby, my Jacquetta. A wife of noble character worth more than rubies. Are you with child again?’

‘Yes, again,’ I say.

‘A summer baby,’ he says with pleasure. ‘Another for the House of Rivers. We are making a nation, my love. The Rivers are becoming an estuary, a lake, an inland sea.’

I giggle.

‘Will you stay at court with the queen for now?’

‘Yes, I will. I’ll go down to Grafton for a few days to see the children and then I’ll come back to court. At the very least, I can guard her from slander.’

Concealed by his cloak he squeezes me. ‘I like the thought of you as a model of respectability, my love.’

‘I am a very respectable mother of nine,’ I remind him. ‘Soon ten, God willing.’

‘Good God, that I shou feel like this for a mother of ten,’ he remarks, taking my hand and holding it against his breeches.

‘God forgive me that I should feel like this for a married man and a father of ten,’ I say, pressing against him.

There is a shout from the deck of the ship above us. ‘I have to go,’ he says reluctantly. ‘We have to catch the tide. I love you, Jacquetta, and I will come home soon.’

He kisses me hard and quickly, and then he steps back and runs up the gangplank to the ship. Without his cloak, without his warmth, without his smile, I feel very cold and alone. I let him go.

THE TOWER OF LONDON,

SPRING 1453

I come back to court after a week at Grafton in time for the great celebration in the Tower of London where the king’s half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor are made earls. I stand beside the queen as the two young men kneel before the king for their investiture. They are the sons of Queen Catherine of Valois, the king’s mother, who made a second marriage as imprudent as my own. After her husband Henry V died leaving her a widow with a baby, she did not, as everyone hoped, retire to a nunnery and spend the rest of her life in respectable grief. She stooped even lower than I did and fell in love with the keeper of her wardrobe, Owen Tudor, and married him in secret. She left an awkward situation when she died, with Tudor as her surviving widower or abductor – depending on your judgement – and his two sons as half-brothers to the King of England or two bastards to a madly incontinent queen mother – depending on your charity.

King Henry has decided to acknowledge his half-brothers, deny his mother’s shame, and count them as royal kinsmen. What this will do to the expectations of the several men who are in line to inherit the throne is beyond understanding. These Tudors will just add to the confusion around the throne. The king honours the Duke of Buckingham, who counts himself as the greatest duke of England, but favours Edmund Beaufort the Duke of Somerset above anyone else. And all the while his true heir is the only man not here and never welcomed at court: Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York.