I glance at the queen, who must be shamed by her failure to solve all this by producing a son and heir, but she is looking down at her folded hands, her eyelashes veiling her expression. I see Edmund Beaufort look quickly away from her.

‘His Grace is generous to the Tudor boys,’ I remark.

She gives a little start at my words. ‘Oh, yes. Well, you know what he is like. He can forgive anyone anything. And now he is so afraid of the common people and of the York affinity that he wants to gather his family around him. He is giving the boys a fortune in lands and recognising them as his half-brothers.’

‘It is good for a man to have his family around him,’ I say cheerfully.

‘Oh, he can make brothers,’ she says, and the unspoken words ‘but not a son’ remain unsaid.

* * *

As the winter nights become lighter and the mornings become golden rather than grey we receive great nws from Bordeaux where John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, four times the age of his pageboy, sweeps through the rich cities of Gascony, wins back Bordeaux and looks set to reclaim all the English lands. This sends the court into an ecstasy of confidence. They declare that first we will win back all of Gascony and then we will win back all of Normandy and Calais will be secure and Richard will be able to come home. Margaret and I are on the river walk in the gardens at Westminster, wrapped in our winter furs but feeling the spring sunshine on our faces, and looking at the first daffodils of the season.

‘Jacquetta, you are like a lovesick girl,’ she says suddenly.

I jump. I had been looking at the river and thinking of Richard, over the sea in Calais; furious – I am sure – that he is not leading the campaign in Bordeaux. ‘I am sorry,’ I say with a little laugh. ‘I do miss him. And the children.’

‘He will be home soon,’ she assures me. ‘Once Talbot has won back our lands in Gascony, we can make peace again.’

She takes my arm and walks beside me. ‘It is hard to be parted from people that you love,’ she says. ‘I missed my mother so much when I first came to England, I feared that I would never see her again, and now she writes to me that she is ill and I wish I could go to her. I wonder if she would have sent me away if she had known what my life would be like, if she had known that she would never see me again, not even for a visit.’

‘She knows at least that the king is kind to you, and a gentle husband,’ I say. ‘When the Greys asked me for Elizabeth my first thought was would he be kind to her. I think every mother would want that for her daughter.’