I put out my hand, though I can feel my face is trembling and my eyes are filling with tears. I take the letter and break the seal but I cannot see what he has written for my sight is blurred. ‘You read it,’ I say, handing it to him. ‘You tell me.’

‘I am sure there is no cause for you to be distressed . . .’ he starts, then he reads the few lines and looks at me aghast. ‘I am sorry, Your Grace. I am so sorry. My lord writes to tell you that your father has died. There is plague in Luxembourg, but your mother is well. She sent the news to my lord.’ He hesitates; he looks at me. ‘You knew already?’

I nod. ‘Well, I thought it was so. Though I closed the curtain on the moonlight and I tried not to hear the music.’

Mrs Jourdemayne, seated beside the wagoner, looks down at me with shrewd sympathy in her face. ‘Sometimes you cannot help what you hear, you cannot help what you see,’ she says. ‘May the Lord who gave you the gift give you the courage to bear it.’

PARIS, FRANCE,

DECEMBER 1434–JANUARY 1435

Woodville does not get his wish that I should see Grafton, though we stay in England for a year, and my lord never gets his wish for an adequate army to serve in France, nor – though he takes power and rules England – can he bring the king’s council or parliament into proper order. We cannot stay in England for the city of Paris sends for my lord duke and says that the people there are besieged by robbers, mutinous soldiers and beggars, and starving for lack of supplies.

‘He won’t refuse them,’ Woodville warns me. ‘We will have to go back to Paris.’

The seas are rough for the crossing and when we arrive in Calais the garrison is so dispirited that my lord commands Woodville to stay there, raise their spirits, and prepare the soldiers for an attack on the French as soon as the weather allows. Then my lord and I prepare to press on down the muddy roads for Paris.

Woodville stands in the archway of the great gate to bid us farewell. He comes beside me and, without thinking, checks the tightness of the girth on my horse, as he always does. ‘How shall I manage without you?’ I ask.

His face is grim. ‘I shall think of you,’ he says. His voice is low and he does not meet my eyes. ‘God knows, I shall think of you every day.’

He turns from me and goes to my lord duke. They clasp hands and then my lord leans down from his horse and hugs his squire. ‘God bless, lad, hold this for me and come when I send for you.’

‘Always,’ Woodville says briefly, and then my lord raises his hand and we clatter out over the drawbridge and I realise I don’t know when I will see him again, and that I have not said goodbye, nor thanked him for his care of me, nor told him – nor told him . . . I shake my head. There is nothing that the Duchess of Bedford should tell her husband’s squire, and there is no reason for me to have tears blurring my sight of the flat road in the flat lands ahead.