For a moment I am afraid that she is going to cling to him, but she tucks her hands inside her sweeping sleeves, strokes the border of ermine as if for comfort, and rises to her feet. ‘I will come again,’ she says to him. ‘And I will do as you suggest. We have no choice.’

He nods. ‘You know the names of the men who will serve you. It has to be done.’

She nods and looks at him once, longingly, as if she wants his touch more than anything in the world, as if she cannot bear to leave, then she ducks her head and goes quickly out of the room.

‘What has to be done?’ I ask as soon as we are outside, walking down the stone stairs towards the watergate. We came in a barge without flags and standards; I was anxious that as few people as possible knew that she was meeting the man accused of treason and named as her lover.

She is alight with excitement. ‘I am going to tell the parliament to appoint me as regent,’ she says. ‘Edmund says the lords will support me.’

‘Regent? Can a woman be a regent in England? Your Grace, this is not Anjou. I don’t think a woman can be a regent here. I don’t think a woman can reign in England.’

She hurries ahead of me, down the steps and onto the barge. ‘There’s no law against it,’ she replies. ‘Edmund says. It is nothing but tradition. If the lords will support me we will call a parliament and tell the parliament that I will serve as regent until the king is well again or – if he never wakes – until my son is old enough to be king.’

‘Never wakes?’ I repeat in horror. ‘The duke is planning for the king to sleep forever?’

‘How can we know?’ she asks. ‘We can’t do nothing! You can be sure that Richard, Duke of York, is not doing nothing.’

‘Never wakes?’

She sits herself at the rear of the barge, her hand impatiently on the curtain. ‘Come on, Jacquetta. I want to get back and write to the lords and tell them my terms.’

I hurry to take a seat beside her and the oarsmen cast off and take the barge out into the river. All the way back to the palace I find I am squinting at the sun and trying to see three suns, and wondering what three suns might mean.

* * *

The queen’s demand to be regent of England and rule the country with all the rights and wealth of the king during the illness of her husband does not resolve the whole problem as she and Edmund Beaufort confidently predicted. Instead there is uproar. The people now know that the king is sick, mysteriously sick and utterly disabled. The rumours of what ails him range from the black arts of his enemies, to poison given to him by his wfe and her lover. Every great lord arms his men and when he comes to London marches them into his house, for his own protection, so the City is filled with private armies and the Lord Mayor himself imposes a curfew and tries to insist that weapons are left at the City gates. Every guild, almost every household, starts to plan their own defence in case fighting breaks out. There is an air of constant tension and anger; but no battle cries. As yet, nobody could name the sides, nobody knows the causes; but everybody knows that the Queen of England says that she will be king, that the Duke of York will save the people from this virago, that the Duke of Somerset has been locked up in the Tower of London to save the City from ruin, and that the King of England is sleeping, sleeping like Arthur under the lake, and perhaps he will only waken when ruin walks the land.