‘You have seen him?’

‘Before I came away. I couldn’t speak to him, I had to take ship, but I knew you would want news of him and if you have a letter for him, Your Grace, I will carry it back for you. I go back next month unless there are new orders.’

‘I will write at once, I will write before you leave,’ I promise. ‘And the garrison?’

‘Loyal to Edmund Beaufort,’ he says. ‘They had your husband locked up while they broke into the warehouses and sold the wool, but once they had taken their wages they let him out again and released the ships from port. That’s how I left on the day of his release. Of course, nobody knew then that the duke was dead. They will know now.’

‘What d’you think they will do?’

He shrugs. ‘Your husband will wait for his orders from the king. He is the king’s man through and through. Will the king command him to hold Calais against the new captain – the Earl of Warwick?’

I shake my head.

‘Drifted off again?’ the merchant asks with cruel accuracy.

‘I am afraid so.’

* * *

The king sleeps during the day, he eats lightly and without appetite, he prays at every service, sometimes he rises in the night and wanders in his nightgown around the castle and the guards have to call the groom of his bedchamber to take him back to his bed. He is not melancholy, for when there is music he will tap his hand to the beat and sometimes nod his head; once he lifts up his chin and sings a song in a wavering piping voice, a pretty song about nymphs and shepherds, and I see a pageboy cram his knuckles in his mouth to stop the laughter. But most of the time, he is once again a lost king, a watery king, a moon king. He has lost his print upon the earth, he has lost any fire, his words are written on the water, and I think of the little crown charm which I lost in the river and which told me so clearly that there was no season when the king would come back to us: the gleam of his gold would be drowned in the deep water.

GROBY HALL, LEICESTERSHIRE,

AUTUMN 1455

I take permission from the queen to leave court and go to my daughter’s home at Groby Hall. The queen laughingly remarks that she could stop a cavalry charge more easily than she could deny me permission to go. My Elizabeth is with child, her first baby, and it is due in November. I too am expecting a baby, a child made from our day and night of lovemaking when Richard came home and went again. I expect to see Elizabeth safely out of childbed and then I will go to my own home and confinement.

Richard will not be here to see this, his first grandchild, of course. He won’t be at my side at Groby Hall, while I wait for Elizabeth’s firstborn, nor at our home at Grafton when I go into my birthing chamber, nor when I return to Hertford Castle, nor in London. His lord the Duke of Somerset is dead and his command, that Richard should return to me, will not be obeyed. Richard cannot keep his promise to come home to me while the future of Calais is so uncertain. The Earl of Warwick is the new Constable of Calais and Richard will have to decide whether or not to admit the new commander, or defy him. Once again Richard is far from me, having to decide which side to join, his loyalty on one side, his greater safety on another, and we cannot even write to each other, as Calais has barricaded itself in again.