Edmund Beaufort looks round for support, but even the lords who are sworn to his house and hate and fear the Duke of York cannot deny that the king has not recognised his son, does nothing, sees nothing, hears nothing, is far, far from us – who knows where?

‘We will return to Westminster,’ Edmund Beaufort announces. ‘And we will wait for His Grace to recover from this illness.’ He throws a furious look at the doctors. ‘The good physicians will waken him, I know.’

* * *

That night as I start to doze in my bedchamber at Westminster Palace I wonder at a sleep that is unbroken, a sleep like death; except that in this sleep one would dream and stir and then sleep again. What would it be like to stir a little and glimpse the physicians and that terrible room with the chair and the knives and the leeches, and then slide back into sleep, unable to protest? What would it be like to open one’s mouth in the silent scream of a dream and fall asleep mute? When I fall asleep I dream again of the Fisher King, of a king who can do nothing as his kingdom falls into chaos and darkness, and leaves a young woman without her husband, alone. The Fisher King is wounded in his groin, he can neither father a child nor hold his lands. The cradle is empty, the fields are bare. I wake in the night and thank God that I have done so, that the enchantment that is lying like a blanket of darkness on the king has not smothered me, and I wonder, I shake my head on my pillow and wonder if it is my fault, if I commanded the king to be blind, if it was my incautious words that blinded him?

When I wake in the dawn light, I am clear-headed and alert at once, as if someone is calling my name, and I get up and go to the jewellery box that my great-aunt Jehanne gave me. There, untouched, is the purse of charms, and this time I choose a crown, to symbolise the king’s return. I tie four different thin ribbons to this one charm. I choose a white ribbon to symbolise winter, if he will come back to us in the winter, a green ribbon if he will not come back till spring, a yellow ribbon if he will come back for haymaking, and a red ribbon if he will come back a year from now, when the berries are in the hedges. Then I tie each of these ribbons to four black strings, and take them to the riverside walk where the Thames is flowing high and fast as the tide is coming in.

There is nobody about as I walk down to the little wooden pier where the wherry-boatmen pick up their passengers, and so I tie the four dark threads to one of the stanchions of the pier and I throw the little crown with the coloured ribbons as far out as it will go, out into the river, and then I go back to the queen’s confinement room where she waits for her time of cleansing to be over and her release into the light.