I look at him blankly.

‘It is your touch I want,’ he says. ‘The pure touch.’

One of the men, who has been watching a flask bubble and then overflow through a tube into a cooled dish set in a bath of ice, puts it to one side and comes towards us, wiping his hands on his apron and bowing to my husband.

‘The Maid,’ my husband says, gesturing to me as if I am as much an object as the fluid in the flask or the iron in the furnace. I flinch at being given Joan’s name. ‘As I promised. I have her. Melusina’s daughter and a virgin untouched by any man.’

I put out my hand in greeting but the man recoils from me. He laughs at himself and says, smiling to my husband, ‘I hardly dare to touch her. Indeed, I can not!’

Instead, he puts his hand behind his back and bows very low and says directly to me, ‘You are welcome, Lady Bedford. Your presence here has been needed for a long time. We have waited for you. We have hoped that you would come. You will bring a harmony with you, you will bring the power of the moon and water with you, and your touch will make all things pure.’

I step awkwardly from one foot to the other, and glance at my husband. He is looking at me with a sort of hot approbation. ‘I found her, and I recognised at once what she could be,’ he says. ‘W could do. I knew that she could be Luna for us. She has water in her veins and her heart is pure. Who knows what she might not be able to do?’

‘Can she scry?’ the man asks eagerly.

‘She says she has never tried, but she has already foreseen the future,’ my husband replies. ‘Shall we try her?’

‘In the library.’ The man leads the way back through the door. My husband snaps his fingers and the two scholars take themselves off into a side room, as the alchemist and Woodville the squire pull a cloth off the biggest looking glass I have ever seen, framed in a case, completely round, shining silver, like a full moon.

‘Close the shutters,’ my husband says. ‘And light the candles.’ He is breathless, I can hear the excitement in his voice, and it makes me fearful. They ring me with candles so that I am encircled in fire and they put me before the big mirror. It is so bright I can hardly see for the winking bobbing flames around me.

‘You ask her,’ my husband says to the alchemist. ‘Before God, I am so excited, I can’t speak. But don’t tax her overmuch, let’s just see if she has a gift.’

‘Look in the mirror,’ the man commands me quietly. ‘Let yourself look in the mirror and let yourself dream. Now, Maid, what can you see?’

I look at the mirror. Surely it is obvious what I can see? Myself, in a velvet gown cut in the very latest fashion with a horned headdress on my head, my golden hair captured in a thick net on each side of my face, and the most wonderful shoes of blue leather. I have never before seen a mirror that could show me myself, all of me, full size. I lift my gown a little so I can admire my shoes, and the alchemist makes a little dry cough as if to remind me to beware vanity. ‘What can you see when you look deeply, Duchess?’