Hawkwood went through the trooper’s pockets. He didn’t know if the key to the manacles would be there, but it was a place to start. If the search proved fruitless, he would have to search the rest of them. Failing that, it was back to the nail, assuming he could find it in the dark. It had been dropped during the fight. He cursed his clumsiness. He should have been more circumspect, but then there had been other things to worry about.

His fingers touched metal. Surely, they couldn’t be that lucky?

He pulled out the key. Maybe manacles were at such a premium that they couldn’t afford to discard any of them. It took only seconds to attend to the remaining locks. Lawrence massaged his freed wrists, wincing as he did so.

“You’re hurt?” Hawkwood said.

“Just a bit bruised. All this brawling’s a reminder that I’m not getting any younger.” He stared down without sympathy at the trooper who’d been hit with the barrel and grimaced. “How did you know the casks contained lye?”

“I didn’t. It was a guess. I saw one of them was leaking and I remembered Stagg telling us he was carrying potash. They make lye by soaking wood ash in water. The trench back there, stinking like a latrine? That’s the way it smells when they use lye to render down dead bodies.”

Lawrence stared at Hawkwood with the same expression of horror he’d shown earlier. “I’m not going to enquire how you know that.”

He gazed bleakly towards the pit and then at the shovels which, isolated on the mound of soil, looked uncannily like a row of truncated burial crosses.

A movement on the wagon caused them both to turn quickly. The trooper Lawrence had toppled with the musket was coming round. His scarf no longer covered his face and he’d lost his cap.

Between them, they dragged him from the wagon and on to the ground. Using a set of manacles, they secured the trooper’s arms behind his back and propped him against a rear wheel. Withdrawing the knife from his boot, Hawkwood squatted down and pressed the point against the trooper’s already bruised and bloodied cheek. “Who ordered this? Was it Quade?”

The trooper’s gaze fastened upon the bodies of his companions before moving to the face of the man holding the knife to his skin. There was no mercy in his captors’ eyes, the trooper saw. Fear flooded through him. As the knife blade moved down towards his jaw, he tried to jerk away, only to crack his head against the wheel rim. Moaning, he nodded.

“And to keep quiet about it?”

Another nod, more fearful than the first.

Which confirmed why they had worn caps and the wrap-around scarves, Hawkwood thought.

“What’s your regiment?”

The trooper found his voice, though the reply came out as a whisper. “F-Fifteenth Infantry.”