He shook his head and glanced at his fingers. Rings of fire seemed to circle them. Death was coming, soft-shoed, shuffling along the corridors. Edward’s great heart lurched and fought back. He stood bravely as he had at Crécy thirty years before. He smiled to remember the way the wind had kissed his face as his captains had shouted ‘Loose!’ and the archers had sent their black clouds of living death into the advancing hordes of French. He would stand like he had then. Death would not take him if he stood. He did so for fifteen hours before sinking to the cushioned floor, his fingers clenched to his mouth. The priests carried him to his bed.

Hysteria gripped the court and the air was thick with gloom and terror. The gilded courtiers whispered about signs and portents; the River Thames, its waters swollen, broke its banks at Greenwich and flooded the palace. A huge, grey fish, the size of a Leviathan, was beached on the northern shores. The sky turned red at noonday and strange creatures were seen in the dark woods to the north. Voices were heard calling in the shadowy streets and ghostly trumpets brayed from the battlements of the Tower of London and Windsor Castle. One of the ladies-in-waiting saw a tarot card bearing the black figure of Death nailed to a royal chair. Another glimpsed the ghost of the dying king’s power in the form of a mystic knight, marching along the moonlit gallery, down the stairs to the great palace doorway.

Edward III, the Lion of England, was dying. Old men recalled their grandparents telling them how the Lion, when young, had seized the throne from his mother Isabella and her lover, Mortimer. Now the Lion’s day was done.

The king stirred himself. He asked for music, and a young girl in a tawny dress and lace-edged veil played the viol. The king went back in time as the ghosts gathered around his bed. His father, Edward II, done to death in Berkeley. His mother Isabella, beautiful and passionate. Philippa his wife with her dark skin and tender, doe-like eyes, dead these eight years. And one other ghost: his most precious son, Edward the Black Prince, leader of armies, a Pompey to his Caesar. The general who had taken the banners of England across the Pyrenees into Navarre but came back with nothing except a disease which rotted his body away. All gone! His son was gone.