“There’s a good boy,” Richard of York called, seeing his youngest heaving the bucket back to Meg. “These men have given their blood for our house. Help as many as you can. George!” he cried, striding towards the great-hall steps with Salisbury and his oldest sons, looking to his brother-in-law for a full report. “Make yourself useful, like your young brother.”

Dickon waited his turn to fill his wooden bucket and then tentatively moved towards a figure lying awkwardly on his side. A battered tin cup lay abandoned on the ground, and picking it up, Dickon dipped it in the water, hoping to slake the billman’s thirst. He gently shifted the man onto his back and then jumped back in horror. The boy—for certes, he was no more than Meg’s age—had only half a face. His lips clung to where his mouth once met his cheeks, exposing his teeth and gums in a bloody, gaping hole. His remaining eye was fixed on Dickon, and he cried out something unintelligible so desperately that Dickon, overcoming his disgust, knelt down beside him and took the lad’s out-stretched hand. It was then he saw the young soldier’s other arm was missing below the elbow and a wad of blood-blackened linen had helped to stem the flow of blood. Constance had told him how every living creature only had so much blood running through its veins, and when it ran out unheeded as this poor lad’s had, even Dickon, young as he was, understood the lad must be dying.

He searched the melee for Constance or any adult who might better save the boy than he, but, seeing everyone was already occupied, he reluctantly turned back and resorted to prayer. “Pater noster, qui es in coelis,” he recited, trying to comfort the billman with the familiar words that always helped him when he felt sad and alone. “Hallowed be thy name….” All at once he faltered as he felt a lifelessness in the fingers he held, and he knew instinctively the man’s soul had flown. “Requiescat in pace,” he whispered, crossing himself and carefully released the cold hand. Staring at the inert form, he suddenly imagined himself lying on a bloody field, his own life seeping into the soil, and he wept—as much for himself as for the unknown yeoman.

Playing at soldier with George, Dickon had often feigned dying, but witnessing real death this day would forever change the boy’s understanding of the seriousness of war.

Sobbing in Nurse Anne’s arms later, he wondered whether he wanted to be a knight at all. He doubted his courage to face awful maiming and death. He could not erase the image of the billman’s gray face and glassy eye, which would haunt his dreams.

“And I did not even know his name,” he moaned, as Anne rocked the trembling boy in her arms.