We sit up all night, and at dawn, in the cold light of the earliest spring morning, there is a bang on the door of the abbey and Margaret starts up. We hear the porter slowly opening the door and a voice asking for the queen. Margaret snatches up her cloak and goes down. ‘Wake the king,’ she says to me as she goes.

I run to the king’s apartments and shake his grooms of the bedchamber awake. ‘News from the battle, get His Grace ready to leave,’ I say shortly. ‘Now.’

Then I hurry down to the great entrance hall and is man in Clifford livery on his knees before the queen.

She turns her white face to me and for a moment I see the frightened girl that would not marry on her wedding day unless someone told her future. I did not foresee this, then. I wish I had been able to warn her. ‘We have lost,’ she says bleakly.

I step forwards. ‘My husband?’ I ask. ‘My son?’

The man shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, Your Grace. There were too many to see. The field was covered in dead, it was as if everyone in England was dead. I have never seen . . .’ He puts his hands over his eyes. ‘Some of them were getting away over a little bridge,’ he said. ‘The Yorks came after them and there was fighting on the bridge and then it broke and they all went into the waters, Lancaster, Yorks, all in together, and they drowned in their heavy armour. The meadow is covered in corpses, the river, filled with men, is running red. The snow is falling on everything like tears.’

‘Your lord,’ Margaret whispers. ‘Lord Clifford.’

‘Dead.’

‘My commander, Sir Andrew Trollope.’

‘Dead. And Lord Welles, and Lord Scrope. Hundreds of lords, thousands of soldiers. It looks like the final day when the dead come from the ground but they are not moving. They are not rising up. Every man in England is down. The wars must be over now, for every man in England is dead.’

I go to her and take her icy hand. The king comes down the stairs and looks at the two of us, hand-clasped, horrified.

‘We have to go,’ Margaret says. ‘We have lost a battle.’

He nods. ‘I did warn him,’ he says irritably. ‘I did not want fighting on a holy day; but he would not be warned.’

Behind him, down the stairs, come the grooms of the household carrying his Bible and his crucifix, his prayer stool and his altar. Margaret’s clothes and her crate of furs follow.

We go out into the yard. ‘Come with me?’ she asks, like a girl again. ‘I don’t want to go alone.’

Not for a moment do I think I will go with her. I will leave her now, even if I never see her again in all my life. ‘I have to look for Richard, and Anthony,’ I say. I can hardly speak. ‘I will have to go out and find their bodies. I may have to see them buried. Then I will go to my children.’