I am lulled like a fool by my happiness. I observe Eleanor Cobham but I bear her no malice. I include her in the dazed pity I feel for everyone who is not me, who is not loved by Richard Woodville. She does not sleep next to a man she loves, she does not know his touch as the early summer dawn turns the windows to pearl, she does not know the whisper in the cool morning, ‘Oh, stay. Stay. Just once more.’ I think nobody in the whole world knows what it is to be in love, to be so beloved. The summer days go by in a haze of desire. But the summer must come to an end. When September comes I will have been widowed for a year and the king’s advisors will be considering a new marriage for me. They will want to employ me to bind a difficult English lord more closely to the throne, they will want to put my dower lands into the pocket of a favourite. Perhaps they will find a foreign prince who would take me as a wife to enforce an alliance. They will put me where it suits them and unless we awake and rise up from our enchantment then I predict that I will be married off by Christmas.

Richard is well aware of this danger, but he cannot think how we can prevent it. Richard says that he will go to the king and his council and tell them that he loves me and wants to marry me; but he cannot bring himself to do it, the disgrace would fall on me and I would be no longer a duchess but a commoner’s wife, no longer the first lady in the kingdom but a woman of earth indeed. At best, thefortune that my husband left me would be confiscated, and we would be left with nothing. At the worst they could arrest Richard for assaulting one of the royal family, send me to a convent and then marry me off to a man commanded to control me, warning him that his wife is a whore and had better be taught submission.

As each dreamy warm summer day goes by, we know that we are closer to the moment when we will have to part, or face the danger of confessing. Richard torments himself with his fear that he will be the ruin of me; I am only afraid that he will leave me in a fit of self-sacrifice. He says I will be ruined if he declares his love, and he will be destroyed if he does not.

The wise woman, Margery Jourdemayne, visits the court, selling love potions, and telling fortunes, scrying and divining for lost things. Half of what she does is nonsense, but I have faith in her skills as a herbalist. I summon her to my rooms and she comes discreetly late, one evening, a hood drawn over her head, a scarf over her mouth. ‘And what does the beautiful duchess want?’ she asks me.