He bids us come in to dinner and turns and leads me in, at the head of all the court. A beautifully dressed woman steps back with a heavy tread, as if to make way for me, begrudgingly. I glance at the young king.

‘My other aunt, Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester,’ he flutes in his little-boy treble. ‘Wife of my much beloved uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.’

I curtsey to her and she to me, and behind her I see the handsome face of my husband’s brother the Duke of Gloucester. He and my husband embrace, arms on each other’s shoulders, a great hug, but when my husband turns to his sister-in-law Eleanor I see that he looks sternly at her.

‘I hope we shall all live merrily together,’ the king says in his tentative piping voice. ‘I think a family should be as one. A royal family should always be as one, don’t you think? We should all love one another and live in harmony.’

‘Of course,’ I say, though if ever I saw rivalry and envy in a woman, I am seeing it now on the beautiful spoiled face of the Duchess of Gloucester. She is wearing a towering headdress that makes her seem like a giantess, the tallest woman in the court. She is wearing a gown of deep blue trimmed with ermine: the most prestigious fur in the world. Around her neck are blue sapphires and her eyes are bluer than they are. She smiles at me and her white teeth are bared but there is no warmth in her face.

The king seats me on his right-hand side and my lord duke to his left. Next to me comes the Duke of Gloucester, my husband’s brother, and his wife goes the other side of my husband. We face the great dining room as if we were their tapestry, their entertainment: bright with the colours of our gowns and capes, sparkling with jewels. They gaze up at us as if we were a masque for their education. We look down at them as the gods might look down on mortals, and as the dishes go round the room we send out the best plates to our favourites as if to remind them that they eat at our behest.

After dinner there is dancing and the Duke of Gloucester is quick to lead me out into a dance. We take our part and then stand as the other couples dance their steps. ‘You are so charming,’ the duke says to me. ‘They tol me that John had married a heart-stealer, but I didn’t believe it. How is it that I have served my country in France over and over and yet never saw you?’

I smile and say nothing. The true answer would be that while my husband was engaged in endless warfare to keep the English lands safe in France, this worthless brother of his ran away with the Countess of Hainault, Jacqueline, and took on a war all of his own to try to win her lands for himself. He wasted his fortune and might have lost his life there, if his vagrant fancy had not wandered to her lady in waiting, this Eleanor, and then he ran away with her. In short a man driven by his desires and not by duty. A man so unlike my husband that I can hardly believe they are both sons of King Henry IV of England.