‘I shall command it,’ she smiles. ‘The duke tells me he will do anything for me. It is a little request for a man who has promised me the moon.’

‘I will stay at court until May,’ I say. ‘And then after my confinement I will join you on the summer progress.’

‘Perhaps we won’t go very far this year,’ she says.

‘No?’ I am slow to grasp her meaning.

‘Perhaps I too will want an easy summer.’

At last I understand her. ‘Oh Margaret, is it possible?’

‘I thought you had the Sight!’ she crows. ‘And here I am, sitting before you, and I think . . . I am almost certain . . .’

I clasp her hands. ‘I think so too, I see it now. I really do.’ There is something about her luminous skin and the curves of her body. ‘How long?’

‘I have missed two courses, I think,’ she says. ‘So I haven’t told anyone yet. What d’you think?’

‘And the king lay with you before Christmas? And gave you pleasure?’

She keeps her eyes down, but her colour deepens. ‘Oh, Jacquetta – I did not know it could be like that.’

I smile. ‘Sometimes it can.’ Something in her smile tells me that she knows, at last, after eight years of marriage, of the joy that a man can give his wife, if he cares to do so, if he loves her enough to want to make her cling to him and yearn for his touch.

‘When would I be sure?’ she asks.

‘Next month,’ I say. ‘We will get a midwife I know and trust to talk with you and see if you have the signs, and then you can tell His Grace yourself next month.’

* * *

She does not want to write to her mother until she is quite certain, and this is a little tragedy, for while she is waiting for the signs that she is with child, a message comes from Anjou to say that Margaret’s mother, Isabella of Lorraine, has died. It is eight years since Margaret said goodbye to her mother and came to England for her wedding, and they were never especially close. But it is a blow to the young queen. I see her in the gallery with tears in her eyes and Edmund Beaufort holding both her hands in his own. Her head is turned towards him as if she would put her face to his broad shoulder and weep. When they hear my footsteps they turn to me, still handclasped.

‘Her Grace is distressed about the news from Anjou,’ the duke says simply. He leads Margaret to me. ‘Go with Jacquetta,’ he says tenderly. ‘Go and let her give you a tisane, something for grief. It is hard for a young woman to lose her mother and such a shame that you never told her –’ He breaks off his words and puts the queen’s hands in mine.

‘You have something you can give her? Don’t you? She should not cry and cry.’