I go to the window. I can hardly see the city walls, the snow is blinding, it is a blizzard blowing around and around. I put my hand over my eyes, I have a memory of a vision of a battle uphill in snow, but I cannot see the standards and I do not know, when the snow turns red, whose blood is staining the slush.

We wait, all day we wait for news. One or two men come limping into York with wounds to be dressed and they say that we had a good position on the hillside but the snow made it hard for the archers, and impossible for the cannon. ‘He always has bad weather,’ the queen remarks. ‘The boy Edward always fights in bad weather. He always has a storm behind him. You would think he was born of bad weather.’

They serve dinner in the hall but there is almost no-one there to eat – just the household staff who are too old or too frail to be pressed into service or are maimed from earlier battles in the queen’s service. I look at a serving man who is deft with his one remaining arm and I shudder as I think of my whole-limbed son, somewhere out in the snow, facing a cavalry charge.

The queen sits proudly at the centre of the high table, her son at her side, and makes a tableau of eating. I am at the head of the table of her ladies and I push some ragout around my plate for the entire meal. Anyone who does not have a husband or a son or a brother in the field called North Acres eats with a good appetite. The rest of us are sick to our bellies with fear.

In the afternoon a steady stream of men start to come in from the battle, the ones who can still walk. They tell of hundreds dying on the road to York, thousands dead on the battlefield. The abbey hospital, the poor men’s hospital, the leper hospital, all the sanctuaries and hostels throw open their doors and start to strap on rough bandages, pack wounds, and amputate. Mostly they start to stack dead bodies for burial. It is like a charnel house in York, the south gate sees a constant flow of men staggering like drunkards, bleeding like stuck calves. I want to go down to look in every face, for fear that I will see Richard or Anthony glaring sightlessly back, his face blown away by one of the new handguns or smashed to a pulp by an axe; but I make myself sit by the window in the queen’s apartments, some sewing in my hands, always listening for the roar and rumble of an approaching army.

It gets dark; surely the day is over? Nobody can fight in the dark, but the bells toll for compline and still nobody comes to tell us that we have won. The king is on his knees in the abbey, he has been there since nine this morning and it is now nine o’clock at night. The queen sends his grooms of the bedchamber to fetch him from his prayers, feed him, and put him to bed. She and I wait up, by a dying fire, her feet up on her travelling box of jewels, her travelling cape laid over the chair beside her.