‘I know you have faith in me. As I have in you. We will win this battle. I will bring happiness and fulfilment into your life, such as you have never known.’ The strength of his arms, the vibrant assurance in his face, the shower of kisses across my cheeks chased away my fears. ‘I’ll speak with my uncle.’ Edmund’s smile lit all the dark corners of my heart; delight bloomed as the reverence vanished and his lively humour returned. ‘Bishop Henry will enjoy putting a spoke in Gloucester’s wheel, if nothing else. Have I convinced you?’

‘Yes.’ I sighed. ‘Forgive me my lack of faith.’

‘It is not easy for you,’ he murmured against my lips. ‘But always remember. I worship at your feet, my dearest love.’

And there was Young Henry, carrying a flagon of wine with fierce concentration. While Edmund accepted his enthusiastic greeting and poured the wine, Madam Joanna’s warnings dissipated as matters of no moment. Happiness settled on my shoulders and my mind quietened.

My conversation with Warwick was far shorter and more to the point than that with Madam Joanna. He did not mince his words. He did not even make an excuse for seeking me out, merely drawing me away from my damsels in the interest of privacy.

‘I don’t like to see Edmund Beaufort prowling around Windsor like a cat on heat.’

‘Edmund does not prowl,’ I replied, stiffening at the implication.

‘A matter of opinion. He has a predatory air, Katherine. And a possessive one, so I’m told.’

He bent his stern gaze on me. He was Warwick today, not Richard. I drew myself up to my full height so that our eyes were on a level. ‘He is here at my invitation.’

‘I know.’ The lines on Warwick’s face, instead of being amiable and smiling, resembled the carvings achieved by a stonemason’s chisel.

‘We cannot forbid him to visit his cousin. My son enjoys his company.’

‘I know that too,’ Warwick snapped. ‘And I don’t like that either.’

‘Edmund Beaufort is welcome in my household, and will continue to be so,’ I stated.

‘And I cannot stop you. But take some advice.’ Warwick was as brusque as I had ever heard him. ‘Don’t become embroiled in a predicament that will bring you more pain than pleasure.’

I raised my chin. I would not listen.

‘I am going to Westminster,’ Edmund announced the next day.

‘Don’t go,’ I pleaded.

‘You know I must.’ Although he smiled, I read raw impatience in his eyes, in the set of his jaw. ‘The sooner I see Bishop Henry, the sooner we can be wed.’

He kissed my hand with admirably restrained courtesy since we were in my solar under the eagle eye of Beatrice. All my fears were smoothed out, like a length of faultless silk, and I accompanied him down to the main door, where my Master of Household waited with Edmund’s outer garments.

‘Look for me within the week,’ Edmund promised me, shrugging into his coat and drawing on his gloves, before leaping down the steps two at a time to where his groom held his horse.

‘Thank you, Master Owen,’ I said, as Edmund in his hunger to be gone had not.

‘My pleasure, my lady,’ he replied, watching Edmund ride from the courtyard with a jaunty gesture, hat in hand. But Master Tudor’s tone caused me to glance up at him, and the dark reproach—or perhaps even contempt—in the gaze that followed Edmund startled me. Then it was gone, a mere shadow, as the Master bowed to me. ‘Do you require anything, my lady?’

I shook my head. Only that Edmund return soon with a date for our marriage.

‘Are you entirely witless, woman?’

It was not Edmund but Gloucester.

How I wished that Edmund stood beside me. As it was, I was forced to face the battering ram of Gloucester’s wrath alone. He arrived within two days of Edmund’s departure, a virulent tempest, raining invective down on my unprotected head when he marched into my private chamber as if about to do battle. At his side came Bishop Henry in clerical splendour, stolid and smiling despite the uneasy flicker of his eye away from mine when I raised my brows. At least Edmund’s uncle bowed, kissed my hand and asked after my health. All Gloucester could do was glower and fume as he launched his first tirade.

‘Have you not even the sense you were born with?’

I gasped at his discourtesy, standing slowly, letting my embroidery slide to the floor.

‘I won’t ask you if the rumours are true. I’m quite certain they are.’ He gestured at my damsels. ‘Dismiss them!’

So I did, quivering with nerves.

‘All of them!’

‘No. Alice remains.’ I needed some support, and since I was fortunate to have her company I would keep her with me.

‘I suppose I should have expected nothing less from a daughter of Isabeau of France. A woman raised in the dissolute stews of the French court!’ Gloucester’s fury reverberated from the walls, hammering in my head. Never had I heard him address anyone with such ferocity. Usually icily polite in my presence, this was hot temper, and lethally personal. ‘What are you thinking of?’ he continued, flinging out his arms as if to encompass the length and breadth of my sins. ‘To allow yourself to be drawn into this farce—’

‘A farce? I don’t take your meaning, sir.’

My anxiety was swept away by resentment quite as strong as Gloucester’s ire. I walked forward to reduce the space between us, clenching my fists and pressing my lips together against his slight on my birth and my parentage, for I knew it would do no good to rant and return insult for insult. My blood and birth were as good as Gloucester’s. I was Valois, daughter of King Charles VI. I would not bow before this man, however much he might be a royal prince. I would play the Queen Dowager with all the skill I had acquired in recent years.

‘I deplore your accusation, my lord,’ I announced, before Gloucester could tell me exactly what he meant. ‘I think you should consider well how you address me.’ Oh, I was haughty. And Edmund’s love had given me a confidence I had previously lacked. My words were well chosen, my manner a perfection of regal disdain. ‘You have no right to address me in such a manner.’

Not expecting such retaliation, Gloucester’s face became suffused with blood, veins red on his cheeks as if he had been riding for long hours into a high wind. His next words bit hard. ‘Are you really so empty-headed,’ he accused, ‘that you think you’ll be allowed to wed Edmund Beaufort?’

‘I think the choice is entirely my own. If I wish to wed him, I will. I am not under your dominion, my lord.’

‘So it is true. You are considering an alliance with Edmund Beaufort. Ha!’ Gloucester stalked to the coffer and flung his gloves and sword there, so furiously that they slid to the floor, causing my dog to skitter out of his path. For a little while Gloucester stood with his back to me, as if marshalling his plan of campaign, and I waited. I would not conduct an examination of my private life at a distance.

‘Well?’ He swung round and marched to within a sword’s length of me. ‘What have you to say about this mess?’

I refused to retreat, even though he used his height and breadth, and his fury, to intimidate. ‘Edmund has asked me and I have agreed,’ I stated. ‘We plan to marry.’

‘It will not be. You will break any agreement you have made.’

‘Will I?’ I looked towards Bishop Henry. ‘What do you say, my lord? Do I wed your nephew?’

The cleric’s wily eye again slid from mine, under pretext of focusing on his rings. ‘I have to agree that it is a matter of concern, my dear Katherine.’

‘A matter of concern, by God!’ Gloucester’s hands clenched into fists. ‘How can you be so mealy-mouthed? It will not happen.’

‘I will do it,’ I reiterated, as if expressing a simple desire to travel to Westminster. Although sharp fear was beginning to undermine my composure, I braced my knees and spine.

Gloucester huffed out a breath. ‘It is unheard of. An English Queen, crowned and anointed, taking a second husband on the death of the King…’

I allowed myself a little laugh. Was this the best he could do? A matter of precedent, and it seemed to me not a strong one. Why should a widowed queen not remarry? I was nervous no longer.

‘Has there never, in hundreds of years of kingship in this country, been a royal widow who has chosen to remarry?’ I asked. It sounded beyond my comprehension.

‘No. There has never been such—and there will not. The Council will not permit it.’

Bishop Henry cleared his throat. ‘Well—yes—in fact, there has.’ He smiled self-deprecatingly, as if he was enjoying himself. ‘Adeliza of Louvain remarried.’

‘Who?’ Gloucester demanded, momentarily baffled.

‘Adeliza. Wife of King Henry the First.’ The bishop’s smile remained fixed when Gloucester flung up his hands in disgust. ‘It pays to be a reader of history, does it not? Although it has to be said that Adeliza was Henry’s second wife and was not the mother of the heir to the throne. Still, if we are speaking of precedents…’

‘Before God! If she had no connection to the royal descent, she has no importance. This is an irrelevance, Henry. If you’re thinking of supporting your damned nephew in this nonsense…’

I raised my hand to stop yet another diatribe against Edmund, even as horror returned to drench me from head to foot. ‘Are you saying that I must never remarry?’

‘Not exactly,’ Bishop Henry offered.

‘There is no precedent for it,’ glowered Gloucester.

‘I understand.’ A bleak landscape, terrible in its vastness, opened up before me. ‘So I must remain alone.’

When Gloucester nodded, I sensed relief in him that he had won his argument, and his voice became appallingly unctuous. ‘Many would envy your position, Katherine. You have your dower lands in England, your son, an assured place at court. It is all eminently suitable for a royal widow.’

Eminently suitable. But, in my mind, lacking one essential perquisite. I knew in my heart at that moment that it was a lost cause, that I would never rouse sympathy from Gloucester, but still I asked.

‘So I have every comfort, every show of respect, but I am not allowed to love?’

‘Love!’ Gloucester’s lips curled as if such an emotion were a matter for distaste. ‘Private amours are for foolish women of no standing. If you were not the Queen Dowager, then why not, if that is what you would seek? Why not find some innocuous nobleman to wed you and take you off to his country estate where you can devote yourself to raising children and good works? But you are not free to make that choice.’

‘It is not right,’ I said, clinging desperately to the last vestiges of hope as Gloucester stripped away all chance of happiness in marriage.

‘Madam Joanna has found no difficulty in remaining a respectable widow.’

‘Madam Joanna is fifty-seven years old. I am only twenty-five and—’

‘And quite obviously incapable of ruling your carnal passions.’

So harsh a judgement! I could barely believe that he had used those words against me, and I froze.

Gloucester’s eyes raked me from head to foot. ‘You are too much your mother’s daughter.’

It gripped me by the throat. Was my mother’s reputation to be resurrected again and again, to be used in evidence against me? And by what right had Gloucester of all men to accuse me of carnal passions? Anger rolled in my belly, dark and intense, until it boiled up to spill over in hot words, scalding the space between us.

‘What right have you? What right have you to accuse me of lack of self-control? I say that you have no right at all to besmirch my mother’s name, as you have no cause to castigate me. Have I not played my part perfectly, in every degree that has been demanded of me? I have accompanied my son, I have stood by his side, I have carried him into Parliament when he was too small to walk. I have never acted with less than dignity and grace, in public and in private. Will I do any less, will I destroy the sanctity of my son’s kingship if I am wed? No, I will not.’

All my resentment surged again, and my will to make my own choice. ‘I do not accept your decision. I will wed Edmund Beaufort. There is no law that says I cannot.’

Gloucester’s ungloved hands closed into fists at his sides. ‘Why the temper? This should come as no surprise to you. Did I not explain what was expected of you when you returned to England?’

‘Oh, you did.’ Fury still bubbled hotly. ‘I remember. Your timing was impeccable. In the week that I had stood beside Henry’s body in Westminster Abbey, you told me of your wide-ranging plans for me that could only be altered by death.’

‘It needed to be said. Your importance in upholding the status of a child king is vital to all of us. Of preserving the claim of Young Henry to be King of England and France. I cannot stress enough how important your role is to England.’