The carter muttered to me that this was the case all around the country. The great religious houses, which had been the very backbone of England, had been emptied of the men and women who had been called by God to serve in them. The public good had been turned to private profit and there would never be public good again.

‘If the poor king dies then Lady Mary will come to the throne and turn it all back,’ he said. ‘She will be a queen for the people. A queen who returns us to the old ways.’

I reined back my pony. We were on the high road and there was no-one within earshot but I was always fearful of anything that smacked of intrigue.

‘And look at these roads,’ he went on, turning on the box of the cart to complain over his shoulder. ‘Dust in summer and mud in winter, never a pot hole filled in, never a highwayman pursued. D’you know why not?’

‘I’ll ride ahead, you’re right, the dust is dreadful,’ I said.

He nodded and motioned me forward. I could hear his litany of complaint receding in the distance behind me:

‘Because once the shrines are closed there are no pilgrims, and if there are no pilgrims then there is no-one on the roads but the worst sort of people, and those that prey on them. Never a kind word, never a good house, never a decent road . . .’

I let the mare scramble up a little bank where the ground was softer beneath her small hooves and we ranged ahead of the cart.

Since I had not known the England that he said was lost, I could not feel, as he did, that the country was a lesser place. On that morning in early summer it seemed very fine to me, the roses twining through the hedgerows and a dozen butterflies hovering around the honeysuckle and the beanflowers. The fields were cultivated in prim little stripes, like the bound spine of a book, the sheep ranging on the upper hills, little fluffy dots against the rich damp green. It was a countryside so unlike my own that I could not stop marvelling at it, the open villages with the black-and-white beamed buildings, and the roofs thatched with golden reeds, the rivers that seemed to melt into the roads in glassy slow-moving fords at every corner. It was a country so damp that it was no wonder that every cottage garden was bright green with growth, even the dung hills were topped with waving daisies, even the roofs of the older houses were as green as limes with moss. Compared to my own country, this was a land as sodden as a printer’s sponge, damp with life.

At first I noticed the things that were missing. There were no twisted rows of vines, no bent and bowed olive trees. There were no orchards of orange trees, or lemons or limes. The hills were rounded and green, not high and hot and rocky, and above them the sky was dappled with cloud, not the hot unrelieved blue of my home, and there were larks rising, and no circling eagles.