One of Philippa’s women fetched me, with a warning that set my heart racing. My sister was unwell. When I came into her bedchamber, it was to find her weeping without restraint, her ladies fluttering round her.

‘Philippa!’

I was across the space from door to bed in an instant, taking her in my arms.

‘Don’t mind me.’ Her reply was muffled against my shoulder. ‘It’s nothing.’

My sister did not weep for nothing. My sister rarely wept. I cast about in my mind for a reason that would reduce her to such misery.

‘Is it Henry?’

‘No.’

‘Mary, then …’ Had she not recovered from the tragic birth of their little son?

‘No. They’re happy enough. They’ve agreed to wait before Mary invites him to her bed again.’

And Philippa wept even harder.

‘Tell me.’ Waving her women away, I shook her gently. ‘I’ll hang the finches in your room if you don’t.’ Their shrill singing wearied after a while.

‘What will become of me?’

‘I can’t imagine. Are we talking about the next hour or the next three years?’

She did not smile, but at least she told me.

‘I am twenty-two years old. Where is the marriage plan for me? What if there never is?’

‘But there will be.’

‘Don’t tell me there is a foreign prince just waiting for me to land in his lap. Sometimes I have a terrible conviction that I will end my days in a convent.’

I smoothed her hair, wiped her cheeks. Philippa was softer than I, gentler, far kinder. What a waste it would be if she did not have her own family to love and cherish.

‘It will happen. You know that the Duke will …’

‘I have no one—and you are so ungrateful,’ she interrupted on a wail of misery. ‘You have a husband. You have a man who flirts with you disgracefully. And you don’t want either of them …’ She covered her mouth with her hands looking at me in utter dismay, eyes blind with tears. ‘I never meant to say that.’

I grew still under the bitter lash. Was it not true? I was wrapped about in my own desires, with no thought for Philippa’s lack. How hard she must find it, with both Henry and I wed, and there was nothing I could say to remedy her grief. Except that I could be more understanding, less heedless of everything that did not touch my own life. I promised myself that I would try. But for now …

‘I’ll let you have John Holland,’ I said.

‘I don’t want him,’ she sniffed. ‘He’s a born troublemaker.’

‘Then you can share Jonty.’ Philippa sniffed again, but her tears were ending. ‘A new audience for his enthusiasms is just what he wants. If you talk to him about anything that yaps or cheeps he will love you more than he loves me.’

At last she smiled, but it had put my faults into stark relief. I was too self-absorbed. I always had been. Maturity demanded that I make amends. In the following days, I devoted myself to her entertainment, until Philippa smiled and played her lute again without descending into lachrymose melodies, and I did not mention Jonty or John Holland even once.

The news of the cataclysm, the whole unbelievable order of events, kept company with us, dominating our thoughts, throughout every mile of that endless journey from Hertford. In the heat of the summer of 1384 Philippa and I were riding for Richard’s court at Sheen on the Thames, as if a storm wind harried our heels. Not Constanza—it would take a major tremor of the earth to move Constanza from Hertford—but Philippa and I discovered a need to be where events were unfolding.

Or at least I did, and persuaded my sister who was not averse to accompanying me, even if we were silent for most of the journey, the potential horror of what might have occurred cramming our thoughts without mercy. Philippa had the angel of death riding beside her to expel her anxiety over her unmarried state.

It had all begun at Salisbury where Richard, summoning a meeting of parliament, was staying at a house belonging to Robert de Vere. Was Richard ever so uncontrolled, so lacking in good common sense? Richard’s political acumen barely matched that of a tadpole. After an early Mass, a Carmelite friar had found his way to whisper in the ear of our puissant King that our father, the Duke of Lancaster, was knee deep in a plot against Richard’s life. The Duke, the friar said with monastic certainty, had the death of Richard in mind. On what evidence? The friar did not know, but he had been told. No, he could not recall who had told him …

What would I have done in the circumstances? The question beat at my mind in time with my mare’s hooves.

Thrown the accusation out, along with the mischief-making friar.

What did Richard do?

I hissed a breath as my mare, under pressure, stumbled.

Richard flew into a fury, ordering that the Duke be put to death for so foul a treason.

‘Why would Richard do so ill-considered a thing?’ I demanded of Philippa. ‘To execute our father without trial. To even believe it in the first place.’

‘Because he is afraid.’ All Philippa’s anxiety over her virginal state had vanished under her disgust. ‘Richard is afraid of any man with royal blood who wields power more adeptly than he can.’

‘Surely he cannot believe the Duke’s guilt. I would not.’

‘Richard does not have your confidence, Elizabeth. Or your loyalty to family.’

No, he did not. Fortunately the more reasoning of the lords around him persuaded our King of the unwisdom of so precipitate a reaction. So the Duke was safe, that much we knew, but in the brooding atmosphere at court, who knew what might transpire? We needed to be there to see for ourselves. Nothing would have kept me at Hertford.

Yet for me there was another gnawing anxiety, far more urgent now that the Duke was safe.

What was John Holland’s role in this? I was unsure, and I disliked what I had heard. The friar, taken into custody for his lies, had been seized by men who proceeded to apply unmentionable torture to extract information over the origins of the plot, until the friar died a horrific death. Which might, as I was forced to admit, have passed my attention except for the name of one of the royal household involved. The hands of John Holland, the same hands that chose and sent me gifts and fairings, were now coated in blood in this unpleasant episode.

Why was the friar dead? To close his mouth forever, stopping any incriminating evidence against those who paid him to perjure the Duke, the court gossips opined. For who was to blame? The men who had done him to death, perhaps?

I needed to see John Holland. This man who touched my heart in some manner, had by this unsavoury incident shattered my confidence in my own judgement.

Before we left Hertford, I handed a bound coffer to one of our escort to strap to his saddle.

‘Come on, Elizabeth! Do we need the extra burden?’

‘Yes,’ I replied to Philippa who was hovering.

‘What is that?’

‘Don’t ask.’

When I handed the little wicker cage containing two singing finches to one of my women, Philippa made no attempt to disguise her impatience.

‘Do you really need to take those? You can buy them two a penny in the street in London.’

‘They travel with me,’ I said.

‘If you want to be rid of them, why not just open the cage door?’ My sister had the uncomfortable ability to read my mind.

‘That would rob me of a chance to drive my opinion home,’ I replied.

‘I’ll remind you of that when the birds drive you demented by their tweeting.’

But I was already mounted, my mind already in London. What would I say to him when I met him again? Was ever a woman thrown into disarray by the actions of a man who should have meant nothing to her?

You love him, don’t you?

I was not entirely certain that I knew what love was. And how could I love a man who might be embroiled in foul murder?

‘What do you think?’ Philippa asked as we approached the gateway to the royal palace at Sheen, and were forced by untoward circumstances to draw rein.

I looked aghast at what we saw. As did my sister.

‘I think there’s a storm about to break on our heads,’ I replied. ‘I don’t like it. And I don’t understand why our own Sergeant at Arms looks as if he would turn us away.’

There were guards at the gate, forbidding us entry, and the guards were in Lancaster colours. I recognised the Sergeant at Arms; I could even name him. I could not imagine what was afoot. All the personal anxieties, the difficulties of choices when violent death had taken a role, were swept aside by the sight of the Lancaster retinue equipped for war.

‘Has something happened we don’t know of?’ I asked.

Philippa merely shook her head.

All was not right with Richard, that much we knew. For the past months his court had exuded the noxious stench of a festering sore, the atmosphere tense, strained with rifts within and without. Dangers had rumbled, from a Scottish invasion of Northumberland, to Richard’s unpopular policy of negotiating a peace with France. As for the cost of Richard’s household and entertainments, parliamentary voices were raised in dismay, and aimed at the royal favourites of Burley, de la Pole and de Vere. Over it all had hung the uncompromising heat with no rain to assuage heated tempers. Drought had threatened. Famine and death.

But this was quite different, enough to touch my nape with fear. Lancaster guards on the gates of Sheen?

At least they recognised us, the Sergeant at Arms offering a smart salute.

‘What’s going on, Master Selby?’

‘Some trouble, my lady.’ A laconic enough reply but his face was set in grim lines.

‘Is the Duke here?’ Philippa asked.

‘He is, mistress.’ He helped me to dismount. ‘If you go in, you’ll hear his voice. He’s not best pleased—and who can blame him, I’d say.’