‘He is happy with the queen and with his son,’ I say steadily, hiding my embarrassment at this report. ‘And he is strong, and issuing orders.’ I do not say that the order was to end the looting of the abbey and town of St Albans, and that it had no effect at all.

‘Thank you for coming here today, Your Grace,’ he says, stepping back.

‘God bless the pretty duchess!’ someone shouts from the crowd.

I laugh and raise my hand.

‘I remember when you were the most beautiful woman in England,’ a woman says from the shadow of the gate.

I shrug. ‘Truly, I think my daughter is now,’ I say.

‘Well, God bless her pretty face, bring her to London so we can all see her,’ somebody jokes.

Anthony swings into his saddle and gives the command, the four aldermen fall in behind me and the duchess, and together we head north to tell the queen that the City will let them in, but will never admit her army.

* * *

We find the queen with the royal household, now advanced to Barnet – just eleven miles north of London, dangerously close, as the aldermen riding with us remark. She has hand-picked the troops who are advancing with her; the worst of the northern raiders are kept at some distance, at Dunstable, where they are amusing themselves by tearing the town apart.

‘Half of them have simply deserted,’ Richard says to me gloomily as we go to the queen’s presence chamber. ‘You can’t blame them. We couldn’t feed them and she had said outright that she would never pay them. They got sick of waiting to get into London and have gone home. God help the villages that lie in their path.’

The queen commands that the aldermen and the duchess and I go back to London and demand entrance for the royal family and a household of four hundred men. ‘That’s all!’ she says irritably to me. ‘Surely you can make them admit me with an entourage which Richard, Duke of York, would have considered a nothing!’

We ride at the head of the household troops and we get to Aldgate where the Lord Mayor meets us again.

‘Your Grace, I cannot let you in,’ he says, nervously eyeing the troops who are standing in ranks behind me, Richard at their head. ‘I would do so if it were left to me, but the citizens of London won’t have the qeen’s men in their streets.’

‘These are not the northern men,’ I say reasonably. ‘Look, they wear the livery of the Lancaster lords, men who have come and gone through the city for all time. See, they are commanded by my husband, a lord you know well. You can trust them, you can trust the queen when she has given her word. And there are only four hundred.’

He looks down at the cobbles below his feet, up at the sky above us, at the men behind me, he looks anywhere but into my eyes. ‘Truth is,’ he says finally, ‘the city doesn’t want the queen here, or the king, or the prince. They don’t want any of them. Sworn to peace or not.’