It was a familiar story. Under Harold and his predecessors Eadgyth’s family had been land-owners, well-to-do. But more than three years after the Conquest, any vague intentions King William might have had for rapprochement with the old English aristocracy had been burned away by rebellion. All over the country there were wildmen operating from the woods and hills and marshland, places the heavily armoured Normans could not follow. The sons of dead King Harold had been raiding from Ireland. The Scottish King Malcolm had married his sister to Edgar the Atheling, the relative of Edward the Confessor who some argued had a better claim to the throne than even Harold had. And so on. As one rebellion after another was put down, very few of the native English nobility retained their positions.

Eadgyth’s parents’ intention was to survive under the new regime. And their main asset, as they saw it, was their only daughter.

‘They brought me back from my convent. I was told I must marry the son of the Norman lord who now owns us. I met the boy. No more than seventeen. He tried to rape me before I told him my name. He’s a bishop now.’ She laughed, not bitter.

‘So you ran away.’

‘I’ve travelled from safe-house to safe-house, sheltered by the clergy and by the people of places like this.’

Orm had heard of this. For peasants stripped of custom and English law, hermits like Eadgyth were a reminder of the old days, the old English ways.

She said to him, ‘And you—?’

‘Orm. My name is Orm Egilsson.’

‘Why are you here? You are not Norman, or English. This is not your home.’

‘I am a mercenary. I fight for pay.’

She shifted in her cramped hole. ‘You were at Hastings?’

‘I was.’

‘On such a day it was better to fight for the winner. Why have the Normans brought you here?’

‘To put a stop to the rebellions.’

Eadgyth said, ‘My own uncle is a wildman, in the fen country of the east.’

‘Yes. The Normans call them silvatici. People of the woods.’ All over England the wildmen had taught the Normans another new word: murdrum, furtive slaughter. ‘The north has been worst, though. This country. And so it will suffer most grievously. Everywhere it is like this, from Durham to York - burned - uninhabited.’ There would be no harvest this year, no lambs or calves; famine would follow the steel.

‘So at last the Conqueror has come here,’ Eadgyth whispered. ‘From Hastings all the way to this remote place of farmers and sheep and cattle.’

Orm heard voices calling. ‘We have no more time,’ he said.

‘Then you must earn your pay.’

He looked into her calm eyes, so like Godgifu’s.

‘What’s this?’ The voice was heavy, the accent crude French.