He bows. ‘Of course, Your Grace.’

The physicians take their leave. One of them will sit in the king’s bedroom to watch over his sleep. The duke’s entourage and the queen’s ladies leave behind the doctors. The couple take one stolen moment when the duke is at her side, and everyone is leaving, and no-one observing them.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he whispers. ‘We’ll say nothing. Nothing. Trust me. It will be all right.’

Mutely she nods, and he bows and goes out of the room.

* * *

The next day they go to wake the king but he does not wake. One of the grooms of the bedchamber comes to the door and tells me that they had to lift the king to the close stool, clean him and change his nightgown which he had soiled. If one of them holds him on the close stool he will pass water, and they can wash his face and hands. They can sit him in a chair though his head lolls and if one of them holds his face up, the other can pour a little warm ale down his throat. He cannot stand, he cannot hear them, he does not respond to a touch. He shows no hunger and he would lie in his filth.

‘This isn’t sleep,’ the groom says bluntly. ‘The doctors are fooling themselves. Nobody sleeps like this.’

‘D’you think he is dying?’ I ask.

The man shakes his head. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life before. It’s like he’s enchanted. Like he’s cursed.’

‘Don’t say such a thing,’ I reply at once. ‘Never say such a thing. He’s just sleeping.’

‘Oh aye,’ he repeats. ‘Sleeping, as the doctors say.’

I walk slowly back to the queen’s rooms, wishing that Richard were with me, wishing that I was at home in Grafton. I have a terrible fear that I have done something very wrong. I am filled with fear, superstitious fear as if I have done something terrible. I wonder if it was my command to the king to see nothing that has blinded him. I wonder if he is the victim of my accidental power. My great-aunt Jehanne cautioned me to always be careful what I wished for, to consider very carefully the words of blessings or of curses. And now I have told the King of England, ‘Don’t look! Don’t see!’ and he has closed his eyes and neither looks nor sees.

I shake my head, trying to dispel my own fears. Surely I must have said words like this a dozen times and nothing has happened? Why would I have the powers to blind the King of England now? Perhaps he is just very tired? Perhaps he is, as the doctors think, shocked by the news from France? Perhaps he is like one of my mother’s aunts who froze up and lay still, lay quite like the king, neither speaking nor moving until she died years later. Perhaps I am frightening myself to think that it was my command that has made him blind.