‘Can he turn?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t see it.’

He shouted an order over his shoulder. The men on deck stood by the ropes for the sails and two men vaulted ashore and held the rope ready to cast off.

I held out my hand to show his ring gripped tight on my finger, above my wedding ring.

The sailor looked at it once, and then looked again more carefully. ‘His ring,’ he said.

‘His own. He gave it me himself. He saw me before he led them out. I am his vassal. I was Hannah the Fool before I came here.’

He stepped back and raked me with a quick glare. ‘I’d not have recognised you,’ he said. ‘And this? Your son?’

‘Yes.’ The lie was said and gone before I had time to think, and then I would not have recalled it. ‘Let me aboard. It is my lord’s order that I go to England.’

He stepped to one side and nodded me up the narrow gangplank and then positioned himself square at the foot again. ‘But you’re the last,’ he said decidedly. ‘Even if they come with a lock of his hair or a love knot.’

We waited for a long hour while others poured down from the town to the quayside. The sailor had to call for other men to come to push the refugees away from Lord Robert’s pier, and curse them for cowards, while the winter afternoon grew dark and no-one could tell us whether Lord Robert had broken the French ranks or whether they had entered the town behind his back and cut him down. Then we saw the town lit up from one point to another as the French besieging army broke through the walls and fired one thatched roof and then another.

The sailor on guard at the gangplank snapped out orders and the crew made ready. I sat very quietly on deck, rocking the child against my shoulder, terrified that it would cry and that they would decide that an extra passenger was not worth the extra risk, especially if my lord was not coming.

Then there was a rush of men and horses down to the quayside and a check and a flurry as they flung themselves from the saddle, threw off their armour and hared up to the waiting ships.

‘Steady, boys, steady,’ came the stentorian shout from the sailor on guard at the gangplank. Six guards stood behind him, shoulder to shoulder with naked blades at the ready, and they checked every man who tried to come aboard for a password, and turned away a good few who raced back down the pier looking for another boat that would take them in. All the time from the town came the explosion of burning gunpowder and the crack of breaking roof tiles and the roar of buildings fired.

‘This is not a defeat, it is a rout,’ I said in bewilderment in the baby’s tiny ear and he turned and yawned with his little rosebud mouth in a perfect ‘ooo’ as if he were in utter safety and need fear nothing.