She nods. The horses are saddled and ready, they put the goods into a wagon, her jewels are strapped behind her on her horse. The prince is in the saddle already, dressed warmly in his riding cape with his bonnet on his head, his swan badge pinned at the front. ‘We will be avenged for this,’ he says cheerfully to me. ‘I will see the traitors dead. I swear it.’

I shake my head. I am sick of vengeance.

They lift Margaret into the saddle and I go to stand near her. ‘Where will you go?’

‘We’ll regroup,’ she says. ‘They can’t all be dead. We’ll raise more men. I’ll get more money from Scotland, from France. I have the king, I have the prince, we will come back and I will put Edward March’shead on the spike at Micklegate Bar beside his father’s rotting face. I’ll never stop,’ she says. ‘Not while I have my son. He was conceived to be king, he was born to be king, I have raised him to be king.’

‘I know,’ I say. I step back and she holds up her hand to give the signal for them to ride out. She waves them out, and then she tightens her grip on the reins and looks down at me, her face warm with love. She holds out her hand, she extends her finger, in the air she makes the sign for the wheel of fortune, then she clicks to her horse and digs in her heels, and she is gone.

* * *

All day more and more men come hobbling into the city, looking for food, looking for someone to strap their wounds. I wrap myself in my cape and get my horse from the stables and ride, in the opposite direction to all the others of the royal court: I ride south down the road to Towton, looking in the faces of all the hundreds and hundreds of men that I pass, for someone I recognise. I am hoping to see Richard or Anthony, I am afraid when I see a man hopping with a makeshift crutch, I freeze when I see a brown curly head face down in a ditch, a congealing patch of blood in the hair. I ride down the road with one man to go before me, and every time we meet a man on horseback, head down, slumped in the saddle, I ask him if he has seen Lord Rivers, or if he knows what happened to his company. Nobody knows.

I start to see that it was a long, long battle, fought in snow so thick that nobody could see further than the end of their sword. Enemies loomed up out of a white blindness and thrust blindly and were blindly cut down. The Lancastrian archers were firing against the wind into driving snow and missed their mark. The Yorks, with the wind behind them, fired uphill and scythed down the Lancaster men, waiting to charge. When the lines met they barged and stabbed and hacked at each other, not knowing what they were doing nor who was winning. One man tells me that, when night fell, half of the survivors dropped down on the battlefield and slept among the dead, covered with snow as if they were all to be buried together.