I don’t care. Richard’s courage has been demonstrated to all of England and nobody can doubt his honour. He has come through a siege and several raids without a scratch and returns to England a hero. My first child, the daughter that I had foretold, is born without difficulty when the hedge is bobbing white with May and the blackbirds are singing in the dusk, that first spring in the country. The next year comes our son and heir.

We call him Lewis, and I find I am entranced to have a boy of my making. He has very fair hair, almost silvery, but his eyes are as dark as the sky at night. The midwife who helps me for this, my second time, tells me that all babies’ eyes are blue and that both his hair colour and his eyes may change; but he seems to me a boy who is half-fairy with this angelic colouring. His little sister is still sleeping in the Woodville cherrywood crib and so at night I put them in together, side by side on their swaddling boards like pretty little dolls.

Richard says with satisfaction that I am a woman who has forgotten all about being a wife and a lover and that he is a miserably neglected man. He is joking though, and he revels in the beauty of our little daughter and in the growth and strength of our son. The next year I give birth to his sister, my Anne, and while I am confined with her, my father-in-law takes a fever and dies. It was a comfort to him that he lived long enough to learn that we had been forgiven by the king, and summoned back to court. Only with a daughter of just two, a boy of one year old and a new baby in the carved cradle, I am not very eager to go.

‘We will never earn enough to pay our debts, living in the country,’ my husband advises me. ‘I have the fattest cows in Northamptonshire, and the best sheep, but I do swear, Jacquetta, we will live and die in debt. You have married a poor man and should be glad that I don’t make you beg in your petticoat.’

I brandish the letter at him with the royal seal. ‘No, for see, we are commanded to court for the Easter feast, and I have another letter here from the king’s groom of the household asking if we have enough rooms for the king to stay with us on his summer progress.’

Richard all but blenches. ‘Good God, no, we cannot house the court. And we certainly cannot feed the court. Is the groom of the household run mad? What sort of house do they think we have?’

‘I will write and tell them we have nothing but a modest house, and when we go to court at Easter we must make sure they know it.’

‘But won’t you be glad to go to London?’ he asks me. ‘You can buy new clothes and shoes and all sorts of pretty things. Have you not missed the court and all of that world?’