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the hood that dropped from her shoulders was heavy with pearls and emeralds. Her golden hair was woven with rubies and she wore a fine golden crown flashing with diamonds, topped by a two-coned headdress. Queen Joan of Navarre, the most beautiful of the famously beautiful daughters of old King Louis, fair skinned and tall, as only a noble lady raised on good food and light work could be.
    At her side stood a five-year-old boy, equally impressively dressed in a doublet of red taffeta hung with pearls, the fine blue silk hat on his head bearing on its front the image of a dragon picked out in tiny rubies. In his hand he carried a small dagger with which he was chopping at the rail of the ship. Next to him was his nurse and the queen’s ladies-in-waiting – four of them, two carrying fine cages of songbirds, one a posy of flowers and the final one a silver cup of wine, ready should the queen require it. Also on the platform was Count Ramon of Aragon, a young knight, tall and slim with the dark hair and skin of his family. He did not wear mail, instead a fine wide-sleeved coat decorated with the four red bars on a yellow field of his homeland. The queen knew it would do no harm to show off the alliances she was making – her oldest daughter Maria was betrothed to Peter, the future king of Aragon and three territories besides. They were both young – she eight and he twelve, but Joan had hope of a marriage and children to cement the bond as soon as Maria was twelve.
    Finally, her own cousin and favourite, the short and squat Ferdinand D’Evreux, stood with his hooded hawk on his arm, his coat a splendid glittering red affair in which the yellow dots on the red square of House Evreux were picked out in yellow sapphires. The castle was so crowded that the servants – eight of them liveried in the yellow on red square of Navarre quartered with the blue fleurs-de-lys of the House of Capet – had to cling to the back of the structure outside of the rail. They were in danger of falling onto the men-at-arms who stood on the decks behind them, sixty strong, all in the same livery.
    The fighting men were crammed in among the crates of chickens, the horses, the barrels, the hunting dogs, the falcons, servants and cursing sailors who shared the deck with them. By the ship’s rail, three trumpeters fought for space to sound the fanfare. At the centre of the throng was the queen’s litter – splendidly canopied in blue silk with embroidered golden fleurs-de-lys. She had brought it with her when she married her husband and had never bothered to refit it in the dual arms of both their houses.
    The queen squeezed the boy’s hand. ‘I can’t believe we have to bend the knee to these Valois barbarians.’ She spoke as much to the air as to her son.
    The trumpets sounded and a heavily armoured man shouted from the deck. ‘Bow down before Joan, Queen of Navarre, Princess of France, Countess of Evreux. Bow down before the lady and her son, Charles, Prince of Navarre!’
    People sounded cheers on the riverbank and there were shouts of ‘God Bless King Louis,’ and ‘Long prosper the House of Capet!’
    The queen waved and smiled, though she still spoke to her son. ‘This should all be mine. And if not mine, then yours. I am the daughter of the king and you are my son. Why should not a woman inherit? And if she should not, why not her son? Those Valois bastards – and they are bastards – stripped me of everything in this land, everything when my father died. We lost Brie and we lost Champagne, and what did they give me in compensation? Angoulême. Half way up a mountain with the laziest and most troublesome countrymen to be found outside of England.’
    The boy continued hacking at the rail.
    ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘we still have rights here. They’ll have to let you see the angel. That’s the least they can do. They get to keep you here – we can’t refuse them that – and you get to see the angel. You’re owed an audience