“It’s over,” he says bluntly to me as I quietly stand beside him. I put my hand on his shoulder; there is nothing I can say to comfort him in this, his moment of shame and failure. “It is all over, and I did nothing. I am seneschal of nothing. You have been the wife firstly of John, Duke of Bedford, a mighty lord, the regent of all of France, and secondly to the seneschal of nothing.”
