I would have given anything for it to pass me by. The last thing I wanted was to make a spectacle of myself in church, especially when the woman was there with her child; but the waves of darkness seemed to wash down from the rood screen, from the priest behind it, from the candles in the stone arched windows, wash down and engulf me so that I could not even see my knuckles whiten as I gripped the pew. Then I could only see the skirt of my gown as I dropped to my knees and then I could see nothing but darkness.

I could hear the sound of a battle and someone screaming: ‘Not my baby! Take him! Take him!’ and I felt myself say: ‘I can’t take him.’ And the insistent voice cried again: ‘Take him! Take him!’ and at that moment there was a dreadful crash like a forest falling, and a rush of horses and men and danger, and I wanted to run but there was nowhere to run, and I cried out with fear.

‘You’re all right now,’ came a voice and it was Daniel’s beloved voice and I was in his arms, and the sun was shining warmly on my face, and there was no darkness, nor terror, nor that terrible crash of falling wood and the clatter of hooves on stones.

‘I fainted,’ I said. ‘Did I say anything?’

‘Only “I can’t take him”,’ he said. ‘Was it the Sight, Hannah?’

I nodded. I should have sat up and pulled away from him but I rested against his shoulder and felt the seductive sense of safety that he always gave me.

‘A warning?’ he asked.

‘Something awful,’ I said. ‘My God, an awful vision. But I don’t know what. That’s what it’s like, I see enough to feel terror but not enough to know.’

‘I had thought you would lose the Sight,’ he said quietly.

‘It seems not. It’s not a vision I would want.’

‘Hush then,’ he soothed. He turned his face to one side and said, ‘I will take her home. You can leave us. She needs nothing.’

At once I realised that behind him was a small circle of people who had gathered for curiosity to see the woman who had cried out and fainted in church.

‘She’s a seer,’ someone said. ‘She was the queen’s holy fool.’

‘She didn’t foresee much then . . .’ someone said with a snicker and made a joke about me coming from England to marry a man and then leave him within three months.

I saw Daniel flush with anger and I struggled to sit up. At once his arm tightened around me. ‘Be still,’ he said. ‘I am going to help you home and then I am going to bleed you. You are hot and feverish.’

‘I am not,’ I contradicted him at once. ‘And it is nothing.’

My father appeared beside Daniel. ‘Could you walk if we both helped you?’ he asked. ‘Or shall I fetch a litter?’