‘Can you foretell with them? Can you know what will happen?’

He shakes his head. ‘Not as I hope that you will do for us. I can tell when the time is ripe, but not the nature of the fruit. I can tell that our star is in the ascendant, but not the outcome of a particular battle. And we had no warning at all of the witch of Arc.’

The clerk tilts his head sadly. ‘Satan hid her from us,’ he says simply. ‘There was no darkness, there was no comet, there was nothing to show her rising, and nothing marked her death, praise to God.’

My husband nods and puts his hand under my arm and leads me away from the table and past the clerk. ‘My brother was a man of Mars,’ he says. ‘Heat and fire, heat and dryness: a man born to fight and win battles. His son is wet and cold, a man young in years but like a child in his heart, damp like a wet baby drinking milk and pissing in his clout. I have to wait for the stars to put some fire into his cause, I have to study for weapons to put into his hand. He is my nephew, I must guide him. I am his uncle, and he is my king; I have to make him victorious. It is my duty; it is my destiny. You will help me in this, too.’

Woodville waits for a moment, then, as my lord seems to have fallen into deep thought, he opens the door to the next room, pushes it wide, and stands back so we can go through. I step into the stone-floored room and my nose prickles at the strange scents. There is a tang like the smell of a forge – hot metal, but also something acidic and sharp. The air is acrid with a smoke that stings my eyes. In the centre of the room are four men, dressed in leather aprons, charcoal fires glowing before them in little braziers set into stone benches, vessels of bronze bubbling like sauce pots. Beyond them, through the open door that leads to an inner yard, I can see a lad stripped to the waist working the bellows of a furnace, heating a great chamber like a bread oven. I look across at Woodville. He gives me a reassuring nod as if to say, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ But the smell of the room is sulphurous, and the furnace outside glows like the entrance to hell. I shrink back and my husband laughs at my pale face.

‘Nothing to fear, I told you there would be nothing to fear. This is where they work on the recipes, this is where they try one elixir and then another. Out there we forge the metals and bring them in to be tested. This is where we are going to make silver, gold, to make life itself.’

‘It’s so hot,’ I say weakly.