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forbid you to talk about any of this – to anyone at all.’
    Her lady looked as if she would say something, regardless, then thought better of it and inclined her head. ‘I will not speak of it, my lady,’ she said. ‘Of course I will not. You may count on my discretion – I will not tell a soul.’
    And she had told everyone, of course. Or at least the queen noticed a change in the attitude of those around her. Her other ladies attempted to dress her hair in different ways, to suggest propitious dates for the fostering of love, when the moon was in certain signs or Venus made an angle to Mars. Elizabeth Butler suggested a potion that she herself had used in order to get her husband through a period of difficulty. The queen had vented her wrath upon her French lady, but she had merely said that it was no secretthat the queen wanted to produce an heir: all the court was hoping for it.
    And, indeed, though it might have been the queen’s imagination, it seemed to her that even the minstrels were looking at her with a certain speculative pity, and the other lords at court with a different kind of speculation. For she was beautiful – everyone said so. Only recently, she had been called ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’
.
But none of that was real to her. It was as if she could not know her own beauty without her husband’s touch; she needed to see herself through his hands.
    And still when he visited her rooms it was in order that they should pray. Whenever she was with him, she could sense the subtle turning away from her if she stood too near. Even when he got into her bed he kept his distance, and despite her inexperience she knew that nothing could happen like this, while there was enough space for another body to lie between them.

February 1447: The Duke of Gloucester is Summoned to a Parliament
     
     
The king held his high court of parliament at Saint Edmunds Bury in the county of Suffolk … during which parliament the Viscount Beaumont, then constable of England, with the assistance of the Duke of Buckingham and other nobles of the realm, at the king’s commandment arrested the famous and noble Duke of Gloucester, uncle to the king.
    Great Chronicle of London
     
     
    The Duke of Gloucester had ridden to the parliament in good faith, through the bitter weather, though he was troubled by gout and by an unnamed complaint of the bowels. And even though the parliament was held in Suffolk’s county, he was not unduly apprehensive.
    Everywhere was deserted; the few cows and sheep they passed stood motionless, as if frozen to the earth. The sky was white, like a helmet of bone; each blade of grass had whitened and stiffened, and where sky and earth met there was only mist like the vapour that rose from his horse’s nostrils. He wondered if his eyes were failing, along with the rest of him, for it was hard to tell where the earth ended and the sky began, and from time to time the mist seemed to form misleading shapes. At one point he could have sworn he saw his brother the warrior king riding towards him, as he used to ride towards his generals before a battle. Then the mist shifted and the image disappeared and, mentally, the duke shook himself. His brother was not the king. His nephew, his brother’s witless, ill-starred son, was king and was even now waiting for him in the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. The duke was one day late, butthey could not expect him to travel so far quickly, in such weather, and so he did not hurry his men or their horses over the frozen ground. Though he was well wrapped in furs, the cold scalded his cheeks and the inside of his nose. He rode on steadily through this landscape that was like a ghost of itself, thinking of fires and wine and other bodily comforts.
    But his reception was not warm. At his lodgings there was a message to say that the king expected him immediately. He was irritated by this, but since relations between them had deteriorated recently and he had been