‘I needed the work. My mother and I had no money left. But I had no close family, nowhere to go.’

‘And a face that didn’t fit.’

‘Yes. I’m grateful to you for finding me that first bit of employment with Umfraville.’ A lord with extensive holdings here in the north country, who had made himself rich from a king’s commission to protect the main droving routes to the north from the marauding Scots. The Umfravilles’ castle at Harbottle on the Coquet was grand. But Saladin didn’t have the stomach for the subdued, spiteful, slow-burning sort of war that consumed this border country - subdued but unending, for the nobles who waged it on both sides of the border grew rich from it. He had been glad to move to the pettier house of Percival.

Happy? Happiness was irrelevant in this life, he thought. Content? Yes, perhaps that was the word. Percival was a man of no brain, it seemed to Saladin, and too drunken to formulate any serious ambition. He was happy just to take his villagers’ tithe and piss it away into the soak-holes behind his hall. But Saladin had no desire to risk his life supporting the petty ambitions of a more restless lord.

‘This will suit me for now,’ Saladin said. ‘Until something better shows up.’ He eyed Thomas. ‘But my mother isn’t so content, is she?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘I send her my money, you know. Just about all of it, keeping only a little for myself to buy a bit of pepper in Newcastle. I have few needs here; I eat with the lord, sleep in his house, ride his horses. What use is money?’

‘She’d be lost without your contribution.’

‘You wouldn’t let her starve,’ Saladin said.

‘Well, true. We remember our benefactors. But she’s a proud woman, Saladin. She doesn’t want charity from a “gaggle of monks”, as she calls us.’ Thomas sighed. ‘But she has ambition enough for a hundred English lords.’

‘Jerusalem remains in Saracen hands.’

‘So it does. But things have changed, Saladin. You and your mother arrived here without wealth, but with one treasure.’

Saladin said reluctantly, ‘Robert’s cipher.’

‘Yes. Perhaps you remember I found a scholar to study it - another Franciscan, a man called Roger Bacon. Remarkable chap. It’s taken him some time—’

‘Let me guess. He’s worked it out.’

‘So he claims. We’ll have to judge his results.’

‘We?’

‘Your mother wants you with her, Saladin. In London, when the truth of the Incendium Dei code is revealed.’