We wait. The summer sun burns down on the city and there are reports of plague in the poor areas, near the stinking river. It is unbearably hot. I want to go home to Grafton and my children, but the king has commanded that everyone must stay at court. No-one can leave London, it is like bringing a stewpot to the boil. As the hot air presses on the city like a lid on a cauldron, the king waits, trembling with distress, for his council to unravel the plot against him. He is a young man who cannot tolerate opposition, it strikes at his very sense of himself. He has been brought up by courtiers and flatterers, he cannot bear the thought that someone does not love him. To think that someone might use the dark arts against him fills him with a terror that he cannot admit. The people around him are afraid for him, and for themselves. Nobody knows what a scholar like Roger Bolingbroke could do if he was minded to cause harm. And if the duchess has put him in league with other skilled men, they may have forged a conspiracy against the king to do him deadly harm. What if even now some secret horror is working its way through his veins? What if he shatters like a glass or melts like wax?

The duchess appears at the high table in the Palace of Westminster, seated alone, her face bright and smiling, her air of confidence unshaken. In the airless hall, where the smell of the meat from the kitchens wafts in like a hot breath, she is cool and untroubled. Her husband is at the king’s side in Sheen, trying to reassure the young man, trying to counter anything that his uncle the cardinal says, swearing that the young king is beloved, beloved of everyone, vowing on his life that he has never seen a horoscope for the king, his interest in alchemy is merely in the king’s service, the herb bed at Penshurst was already planted under the signs of the stars when they got there. He does not know who planted it, perhaps the former owner? I sit with the ladies in the duchess’s rooms, and sew shirts for the poor, and say nothing, not even when the duchess suddenly laughs at random and declares that she does not know why the king delays so long at Sheen Palace, surely he should come to London, and then we could all go on progress to the country, and get out of this heat.

‘I believe he is coming tonight,’ I volunteer.

She glances out of the window. ‘He should have come earlier,’ she says. ‘Now he’ll be caught in the rain. There’s going to be such a storm!’

A scud of sudden rain makes the women cry out, the sky is black as a crow over London and there is a rumble of thunder. The window rattles in the rising wind and then it is flung open b a gust of icy wind. Someone screams as the frame bangs, and I rise up and go to the window, catch the flying latch and draw it shut. I flinch back from the crack of lightning over the city. A storm is rumbling in, over the king’s route, and within moments there is the rattle of hail against the window, like someone flinging pebbles, and a woman turns her pale face to the duchess and cries, ‘A storm over the king! You said that there would be a storm over the king.’