The queen is tremendously confident. November comes and sill she does not return to London, hating London and blaming the London ballad-makers and chap-book sellers for her unpopularity in the kingdom. Their tales and songs describe her as a wolf, a she-wolf who commands a Fisher King – a man reduced to a shell of what he should be. The most bawdy rhymes say she cuckolded him with a bold duke and popped their bastard in the royal cradle. There is a drawing of a swan with the face of Edmund Beaufort, waddling towards the throne. There are songs and ale-house jokes about her. She hates London and the apprentices who laugh at her.

Instead she orders the parliament to come to Coventry – as if parliaments can be ordered by a woman like outriders – and they obediently come as if they were her messengers, bound to do her bidding when she orders new oaths of loyalty to the king but also to her by name, and to the prince. Nobody has ever sworn loyalty to a queen before – but they do now. She cites the three York lords for treason, takes their lands and fortunes, and hands them out as if it were all the twelve days of Christmas come early. She orders the Duchess Cecily to attend so that she can hear her husband named as a traitor, and listen to the death sentence passed on him. Everything the York lords owned, every rood of land, every banner, every honour and title, every purse of gold, is stripped from them. The poor Duchess of York, now a royal pensioner and a pauper, goes to live with her sister, the queen’s loyal lady, Anne the Duchess of Buckingham, in something between house arrest and torment; a half-life for a woman who was once called ‘Proud Cis’ and now finds herself a married woman with a husband in exile, a mother missing her oldest son, Edward, the daughter of a great house who has lost all her lands and her inheritance.

SANDWICH, KENT, AND CALAIS,

WINTER 1460

Richard is ill paid for warning the queen that the Warwick ownership of Calais has put an enemy on our shoreline, for as soon as the fighting is done and the peace won, she asks him to go to Sandwich and reinforce the town against attack.

‘I’ll come too,’ I say at once. ‘I can’t bear you to be in danger and me far away. I can’t bear for us to be parted again.’

‘I’m not going to be in danger,’ he lies to reassure me, and then, catching my sceptical expression, he giggles like a boy caught out in a blatant falsehood. ‘All right, Jacquetta, don’t look at me like that. But if there is any danger of an invasion from Calais you will have to go home to Grafton. I’ll take Anthony with me.’

I nod. It’s useless to suggest that Anthony is too precious to be exposed to danger. He is a young man born into a country constantly at war with itself. Another young man, of just his age, is Edward March, the Duke of York’s son, across the narrow seas, serving his apprenticeship in soldiering with the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury. His mother, the Duchess of York, held in England, will not be able to get a word to him. She will have to wait and worry, as I wait and worry. This is not a time when mothers can hope to keep their sons safe at home.