‘Oh no . . . er . . . Margaret.’ He shakes his head. ‘We must forgive our enemies. We forgive our enemies as we hope to be forgiven. Is he French?’

She glances at me and I know my horror is plain on my face. She pats his hand gently and rises up from her throne and falls into my arms, as easily as if she were my little sister, weeping for some hurt. We turn together to the window, leaving Richard to approach the throne and speak quietly to the king. My arm is around her waist as she leans against me; together we look, unseeing, over the beautiful sunny gardens inside the thick castle walls, laid out below us like a piece of embroidery in a frame. ‘I have to command everything now,’ she says quietly. ‘Edmund is dead, and the king is lost to himself. I am so alone, Jacquetta, I am like a widow with no friends.’

‘The council?’ I ask. I am guessing that they would put York back in as lord protector if they knew how frail the king truly is.

‘I appoint the council,’ she says. ‘They do as I say.’

‘But they will talk . . .’

‘What they say in London doesn’t matter to us e, at Kenilworth.’

‘But when you have to call a parliament?’

‘I will summon them to Coventry where they love me and honour the king. We won’t go back to London. And I will only summon the men who honour me. No-one who follows York.’

I look at her, quite appalled. ‘You will have to go to London, Your Grace. Summer is all very well; but you cannot move the court and the parliament from the city forever. And you cannot exclude the men of York from government.’

She shakes her head. ‘I hate the people there and they hate me. London is diseased and rebellious. They take the side of parliament and York against me. They call me a foreign queen. I shall rule them from a distance. I am Queen of London but they shall never see me, nor have a penny of my money, nor a glimpse of my patronage nor a word of my blessing. Kent, Essex, Sussex, Hampshire, London – they are all my enemies. They are all traitors, and I will never forgive them.’

‘But the king . . .’

‘He will get better,’ she says determinedly. ‘This is a bad day for him. Today is a bad day. Just today. Some days he is quite well. And I will find a way of curing him, I have doctors working on new cures all the time, I have licensed alchemists to distil waters for him.’

‘The king doesn’t like alchemy, or anything like that.’

‘We have to find a cure. I am issuing licences to alchemists to pursue their studies. I have to consult them. It is allowed now.’

‘And what do they say?’ I ask her. ‘The alchemists?’