‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ I say. ‘It is for me. Let me close it out.’

‘Why, what is it?’

‘I have heard it twice in my life before,’ I say, thinking of my little sister who died almost as she drew her first breath, and then the sighing choir that whispered goodbye to my great-aunt. ‘I am afraid it is the death of one of my family,’ I say quietly. ‘It is the singing of Melusina,’ and I turn from her and go down the darkened gallery to my bedroom.

In the morning she shows me how to dry herbs, how to make a tisane, how to make a tincture, and how to draw the essence from flowers using a bed of wax. We are alone in the still room, the pleasant smell of crushed leaves around us, the coolness of the stone floor beneath our feet, the marble sink filled with cold water.

‘And does the singing tell you of a death?’ she asks simply.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I pray that my mother and father are well. This seems to be the only gift I have: foreknowledge of loss.’

‘Hard,’ she says shortly, and passes me a pestle and mortar with some seeds for crushing.

We work together in silence for a while, then she speaks. ‘There are herbs especially for a young woman, newly married,’ she observes as if to the leaves that she is washing in the sink. ‘Herbs that can prevent a baby, herbs that can cause one. They are in my recipe book.’

‘You can prevent a baby?’ I ask.

‘I can even stop one coming when a woman is already with child,’ she says with a nasty little smile. ‘Pennyroyal, mugwort, and parsley will do it. I have planted the herbs in your garden for you to use when you need. If you ever need.’ She glances at the flatness of my belly. ‘And if you want to make a baby you have those herbs too, to your hand. Raspberry leaves from your orchard, and weeds, easy enough to find: nettle leaves, and clover flowers from the field.’

I dust off my hands and pick up my slate and chalk. ‘Tell me how to prepare them,’ I say.

Margery stays for more than the week that she has promised and when she leaves, my herb garden is planted with everything but those plants which need to wait for the descending moon, and the still room already has a few jars of herbs in wine, and a few bunches of herbs hung up to dry. She will go back to London in one of my lord’s wagons, her servant-boy with her, and I go to the stable yard to say goodbye. As I watch her clamber nimbly into the cart, a guard of half a dozen, with a messenger in my lord’s livery of red and white, clatter into the yard and Richard Woodville swings down from his horse.

‘My lady, I bring a message from my lord,’ he says. ‘He has marked it for you, only.’