‘When do we leave?’ I ask. I am ashamed at my own reluctance to hear this call to arms.

‘We’ll have to go now,’ he says.

* * *

We take the great north road to York, certain that the queen’s army will be marching down to London, and we will meet them on the way. At every stop during the cold days, at every night in inns or abbeys, or the great houses, people are talking about the queen’s army as if it were an invading force of foreigners, as if it were a source of terror. They say that she has soldiers from Scotland and that they march barefoot over stones, their chests naked even in the worst of weather. They are afraid of nothing and they eat their meat raw, they will run down the cattle in the fields and gouge flesh from their flanks with their bare hands. She has no money to pay them and she has promised them that they can have anything they can carry if they will take her to London and rip out the heart of the Earl of Warwick.

They say that she has given the country to the King of France in return for his support. He will sail his fleet up the Thames and lay waste to London, he will claim every port on the south coast. She has already signed over Calais to him, she has sold Berwick and Carlisle to the Scots queen. Newcastle will be the new line of the frontier, the north is lost to us forever and Cecily Neville, the Yorkchingow, will be a Scots peasant.

There is no point trying to argue with this mixture of terror and truth. The queen, a woman in armour, leading her own army, with a son conceived by a sleeping husband, a woman who uses alchemy and possibly the dark arts, a French princess in alliance with our enemies, has become an object of utter horror to the people of her country. With the Scots behind her, she has become a winter queen, one who comes out of the darkness of the north like a wolf.

We stop for two nights at Groby Hall to see Elizabeth and meet with her husband, Sir John Grey, who has mustered his men and will march north with us. Elizabeth is strained and unhappy.

‘I can’t bear waiting for news,’ she says. ‘Send to me as soon as you can. I can’t bear the waiting. I wish you didn’t have to go out again.’

‘I wish it too,’ I say softly to her. ‘I’ve never ridden out with such a heavy heart. I am tired of war.’

‘Can’t you refuse to go?’

I shake my head. ‘She is my queen, and she is my friend. If I did not go for duty I would go for love of her. But what about you, Elizabeth? Do you want to go and stay with the children at Grafton while we are away?’