It is the safest way, but I see him struggle to obey the order.

‘High and mighty!’ someone complains. ‘The sort that should be brought down.’

‘Are you a king’s man?’ someone demands. ‘Think you should have everything and care nothing for the poor man?’

At last, he takes his cue. ‘Not I!’ he says cheerfully. ‘I am with you all!’

I nod at him, and the movement of the crowd takes him from me, almost at once. I let my horse walk with them. Familiarly, a woman rests her hand on my horse’s neck. ‘So where are we going?’ I ask her.

‘To the bridge, to see him come across the bridge!’ she says exultantly. ‘I see you are a lady but you will not be ashamed of the company he keeps. He has gentry and squires with him, knights and lords. He is a man for all the people, of all degree.’

‘And what will he do for us when he comes?’

‘You don’t know? Where have you been?’

Smiling, I shake my head. ‘I have been in the country, all this is a surprise to me.’

‘Then you have come back to the City at the very hour of its joy. He will speak for us at last. He will tell the king that we cannot bear the taxation, that the fat lords will ruin us all. He will order the king to ignore the French slut, his wife, and take good advice from the good duke.’

‘The good duke?’ I query. ‘Who do you call the good duke now?’

‘Richard Duke of York, of course. He will tell the king to lie with his worthless wife and get us a son and heir, to take our lands in France back again, to send away the wcked men who steal the wealth of the country and do nothing but make their own fortunes and fight among themselves. He will make this king as great as the king before and we will be happy again.’

‘Can one man do all this?’ I ask.

‘He has raised an army and defeated the king’s men already,’ she says delightedly. ‘They chased after him to Sevenoaks and he struck them down. This is our champion. He has defeated the royal army and now he takes the City.’

I can feel a pain hammering in my head. ‘He destroyed the king’s army?’

‘Led them on, turned on them and struck them down,’ she says. ‘Half of them ran away, half of them joined him. He is our hero!’

‘And what of the lords who led the men?’

‘Dead! All dead!’

Richard, I think to myself in silence. Surely the two of us did not come so far, and risk so much, for Richard to be ambushed by a hedge-sparrow commander at the head of patchwork rebels, and killed outside Sevenoaks? Surely I would know if he were injured or dead? Surely I would have heard Melusina sing or felt the very spheres dance sorrowfully one with another, to mourn him? Surely the man that I have loved for all my adult life, loved with a passion that I did not even know was possible, could not, cannot be dead in a Kentish ditch, and I not know?