She saw how much the lie cost Thomas. She wishes she could somehow undo all this, and go back, and deal straight with the world – or as straight as she ever had – and have Thomas as he was.

Richard had wailed when he’d heard the news and had taken himself off, fumbling up the steps.

‘Should we try to help?’ Katherine had asked Sir John.

Sir John had shaken his head.

They’d heard him thump around in the chamber above and then it had gone quiet.

Now Sir John pours himself some of the ale, and speaks of the past month.

‘We didn’t go to Sandal,’ he says. ‘Didn’t want to spend all winter in a castle with so many men cooped up behind those damned walls that it’d be a job to find somewhere to shit without another man doing the same on your lap. And thank the Lord I didn’t go. I suppose you heard? York and his men went charging out of the castle gates – leaving the bloody things open, can you believe it, and the drawbridge down – to relieve a foraging party that had, quite against the rules of the Christmas truce, been attacked by some of Somerset’s men.

‘The next thing they know the woods are heaving with more of the bastards. It was over in minutes, I heard, and anyone of any quality whom we had on our side – gone. The Duke of York, of course, and that young fool Rutland – do you remember him at Westminster? Arguing with Warwick, he was – he was murdered by Clifford after it was all over, with the lad trying to get into Wakefield. As for the Earl of Salisbury, well. He was taken to Pontefract. I thought they were going to ransom him to Warwick. Can you imagine? An Englishman paying another Englishman for the return of his own father? But in the end one of Exeter’s bastards dragged the poor old sod from his rooms and chopped his bloody head off. Right there and then. The Earl of Salisbury!’

He asks Thomas about the battle Edward of March has won – he cannot stop calling him the Earl of March – and what he thinks will happen in London.

‘I have it from William Hastings,’ Thomas says, ‘that since King Henry’s adherents killed Richard, the old Duke of York, at Wakefield, then the Act of Accord is void and that Edward, the new Duke of York, is free to claim the throne as his right.’

‘Then what will happen to King Henry?’ Sir John wants to know. ‘Will he resign?’

Thomas does not know.

‘Not if he is with the Queen,’ Katherine cannot stop herself answering.

Sir John squints at her, then tugs on his beard. It sounds raspy. She takes a sip of the ale, which is disgusting, and she tries to do it delicately. There is a silence until Sir John turns to Thomas.