The man denied the blindness but had the boy fetch two more. Of these, one was sound, the other had swollen glands in its neck. The fifth horse was too flighty, the sixth had bad teeth, but the seventh, a bay with one white sock, Medina liked. A good top line, a balanced walk, a steady gaze. He stayed with the horses while Calley went to another part of the field to barter. He talked to the bay, murmured to her, as he had, in better times, whispered to girls through the iron grille-work of windows in narrow Cordovan streets. For tack, there was another man, a hoard of stolen leather tumbled out of sacks on to the grass. They bought what they needed. Medina made the horses ready, kept them calm, then he and Calley rode back to the High Street, found a farrier’s behind one of the inns, left the horses there for shoeing.

It was three o’clock when they returned to the boarding house. Time for dinner. The food was served in a basement refectory by Mrs. Cooke herself, an elderly woman with red hair, a pipe smoker, who dipped her ladle into an iron pot and dribbled the food into bowls. While they ate she read from the Bible, a large edition with a cracked leather binding that she balanced on top of the empty pot. The company, all of them men, sat in rows, the only sounds the working of their jaws and the language of the Gospels. (“What is this?” hissed Medina, pointing with his knife to what lay under a thin shroud of dark gravy. He thought it might be an ear. “Slink,” answered Calley without looking up. End of conversation.)

The others, when they had finished their food, crossed to the bottle shop, ran there some of them, but Calley did not care for liquor. He had in his pack what he called “a screw of tea” and with this and water from the basement he made, in their room, his afternoon refreshment.

“Here’s something else you don’t know about,” he said, when he had done with the fussy work of making the tea, when he had broken off the nose of a little sugar-loaf, then turned his back to hide the tea in some compartment of his pack.

“I know what tea is,” said Medina.

Calley grimaced. “I’m not talking about if you know what it is. I know you know what it is. It’s fucking tea. That’s not what I’m saying.”