“Aye, we do,” said Will Hastings, who had ridden up on Edward’s other side. He was joined by the remaining lords in Edward’s party, and with their encouragement the king had made the only sensible decision. Just as his father had done at Ludlow ten years earlier, he had been forced to choose flight. “We must go if we are to gather our strength again and defeat Warwick and Margaret. We must sail to Flanders,” the king told the group. “Where is the nearest port from here?”

Anthony Woodville had spoken up then: “Bishop’s Lynn is close to my wife’s lands, and I am well known there.”

“What is that noise?” Richard recalled saying. His sharp young ears had heard something more ominous to the west of them. “Good Christ, can that be Montagu already? We must go.”

Always best in a crisis, Edward, made a quick decision. He shouted thanks to his soldiers and told them to return to their respective homes. He also dispatched a messenger to his queen at Westminster to tell her to take sanctuary in the abbey. He appeared composed, but his eyes had been alive with adventure when he wheeled his horse around to face east and led his party of nobles and squires in a gallop across the flat countryside of Lincolnshire to the North Sea. All they had to do was cross the treacherous body of water known as The Wash, which had swamped many a vessel and drowned many a sailor in its unusual tides over the centuries, and reach Lynn.

Richard frowned as he remembered watching helplessly when one of the small boats had indeed capsized as the Wash claimed yet more victims, dragged down by their mail. Bedraggled and exhausted, the small royal party had clambered aboard the two merchant ships turned over to the king at Lynn and almost immediately set sail with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Richard turned to look at Edward now, standing alone in the bow of the larger of the two vessels and staring disconsolately at the unending sparkling waves that stretched on and on to meet the sky. How low he must feel, Richard mused. All that was missing was an attack by pirates!

The ships that appeared from nowhere were not pirates, but almost as dangerous.

“Easterlings!” the boy in the crow’s nest cried to his captain. “Off the starboard bow!”

“Hard to port!” the captain shouted. “We shall make for Holland and not Flanders.”

Edward walked unsteadily along the rolling deck to Richard. “God is not on my side this time,” he groused. “My trade policy towards the greedy Hansards has made them enemies of a sort. They have been attacking our ships to spite us. ’Twill be ironic if I am carried off as their prisoner to some godforsaken German hellhole after all this.”