The boat nudges against the Westminster Palace stairs and my husband takes my hand and helps me up the wooden steps to the pier. A servant comes forwards with a torch and lights our way through the gardens to the river entrance.

‘He’s been arrested,’ Richard says.

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll leave you in our rooms, and then I’ll go and see what I can find out.’

I pause under the archway of the entrance and I take his cold hands in mine. ‘What do you fear?’

‘Nothing yet,’ he says unconvincingly, then he takes my arm and guides me into the palace.

* * *

Richard comes in at night and tells me that nobody seems to know what is happening. Three of the duchess’s household have been arrested: men that I know, men that I greet daily. The scholar Roger Bolingbroke, who came to visit us at Penshurst, and the duchess’s chaplain who has served the Mass before me a dozen times, and one of the canons at St Stephen’s chapel in this very palace. They are accused of drawing up a horoscope chart for Eleanor. The chart has been found, and they say that it foretells the death of the young king and her inheritance of the throne.

‘Ever seen a chart for the king?’ my husband asks me tersely. ‘He has left the palace for Sheen with nobody but the closest men of his council. We are ordered to stay here. We are all under suspicion, he hates this sort of thing, it terrifies him. His council will come here and there will be questions. They might call on us. My lord Bedford never showed you a chart for the king, did he?’

‘You know he drew up charts for everyone,’ I say quietly. ‘You remember the machine that hung above the plan of France which showed the positions of stars? He used it to show the stars at someone’s birth. He drew up a chart for me. He drew up his own. Probably one for you. Cerainly, he will have drawn up a chart for the king.’

‘And where are all the charts?’ my husband asks tightly. ‘Where are they now?’

‘I gave them to the Duke of Gloucester.’ Quietly the horror of this dawns on me. ‘Oh, Richard! All the charts and the maps I gave to Duke Humphrey. He said he had an interest. I only kept the books, the ones we have at home. My lord left the books to me, the equipment and the machines I gave to the duke.’ I can taste blood in my mouth and I realise that I have peeled the skin from my lip. I put my finger to where the raw skin is stinging. ‘Are you thinking that the duchess might have taken the king’s chart? Might she have used it? Will they link me to the charges since I gave her husband the king’s chart?’

‘Perhaps,’ is all he says.

* * *