‘No!’ I cry again, utterly horrified. I come to the bed and put my hand on his arm, pulling him away from her; but they are blind and deaf to me, clinging together, her arms around his neck, he is half lying on her, as he covers her face with kisses and whispers promises that he cannot keep, and at that moment, at that terrible, terrible moment, the door behind us opens and Henry, King of England, comes into the room and sees the two of them, wrapped in each other’s arms: his pregnant wife and his dearest friend.

For a long moment he takes in the scene. Slowly, the duke lifts his head and, gritting his jaw, gently releases Margaret, laying her back on the bed, pressing her shoulders to make her stay on the pillows, lifting her feet and straightening her gown around her ankles. Slowly, he turns to face her husband. He makes a little gesture with his hands to Henry, but he says nothing. There is nothing he can say. The king looks from his wife, raised on one elbow, white as a ghost on her bed, to the duke standing beside her, and then he looks at me. He looks puzzled, like a hurt child.

I reach out to him, as if he were one of my own children, cruelly struck. ‘Don’t look,’ I say foolishly. ‘Don’t see.’

He puts his head on one side, like a whipped dog, as if he is trying to hear me.

‘Don’t look,’ I repeat. ‘Don’t see.’

Strangely, he steps towards me and lowers his pale face to me. Without knowing what I am doing, I lift my hands to him and he takes one and then the other and cups my palms over his eyes, as if to blindfold himself. For a moment we are all quite frozen: my hands over his eyes, the duke waiting to speak, Margaret leaning back on her pillows, her hand over her curving belly. Then the king presses my hands hard against his closed eyelids and repeats my words: ‘Don’t look. Don’t see.’

Then he turns away. Without another word, he turns his back on all three of us, and walks from the room, quietly closing the door behind him.

* * *

He does not come to dinner that night. The queen’s dinner is served in her privy rooms; a dozen ladies and I sit down to eat with her and send half the courses back untouched. Edmund, Duke of Somerset, takes the head of the table in the great hall and tells the hushed diners that he has bad news for them: we have lost the last of our lands in France, except for the pale, town and garrison of Calais, and that John Talbot the Earl of Shrewsbury has died riding out for a forlorn cause that his gallantry and courage would not allow him to refuse. The town of Castillon begged him to come and relieve the French siege, and John Talbot could not turn a deaf ear when his countrymen asked for help. He held to his vow that he would not put on armour against the French king who had released him on that condition. So he rode out without armour, at the head of our troops, into battle without a weapon or a shield. It was an act of the most perfect chivalry and folly. An act worthy of the great man that he was. An archer felled his horse and an axeman hacked him to death as he was pinned down underneath it. Our hopes of holding our lands in France are over, we have lost Gascony for the second, and almost certainly the last, time. Everything that was won by this king’s father has been lost by his son, and we have been humiliated by France that once was our vassal.