Close to, Warwick is clean-shaven with a long face, a wide jaw and eyes like polished brown pebbles. There is just one deep line down the side of his thin mouth, the work of nature rather than a wound, and there is no spare flesh on him at all, so that they can see every muscle at work below the thin skin of his face, trying to control his expression, and failing.

‘Hastings brings him now,’ he says. ‘He can tell you. The hart got away, that I can say.’

He turns his horse.

‘Are you not staying to see him home?’ Thomas asks. He speaks before he has thought it through. Warwick turns his horse with a savage yank. He stares at Thomas. His lip is curled and his eyes have deepened in his head. He spurs his horse towards him. Thomas steps back.

‘Who are you?’ Warwick spits. ‘Who are you to presume anything?’

Geoffrey intervenes, stepping between them. Thank the Lord he is so fat.

‘Sorry, my lord,’ he says. ‘He forgets himself.’

‘We will look to him,’ Katherine says, meaning Richard, distracting the Earl. Warwick glances her way.

‘Do so, will you?’ He turns to the other men. ‘Come, we have wasted enough time here.’

He makes it sound as if it is someone else’s fault he’s been hunting. He turns his horse, and with one last look at Thomas, he jags his spurs into the animal’s belly and canters off, leading the party away over the crest without a backward glance.

‘Bastard,’ Geoffrey says.

Thomas and Katherine follow him around to the other side of the fort, over the earthworks and along a shaded track through the woods. A horse appears at the end of the charcoalers’ track. Then two more. The first is ridden by the man Walter called Hastings. It was he who invited Richard to join the hunt and here he comes back, leading the second horse on a long rein; Richard is slumped over the horse’s withers, his arms either side of the horse’s neck, his face waxy and lifeless. Next to him trots the hunter with the short-legged dog. Behind comes the third horse, ridden by the cleric in black.

Despite her anxiety for Richard, when Katherine sees the cleric, she catches her breath. All the old anxieties grip her, and she hangs her head. The cleric ignores her, and rides by in silence. They lead the horses into the yard where Hastings slides from the saddle to help Geoffrey and Thomas ease Richard down and carry him to a grassy bank. They lay him face first on the turf. The arrow is buried deep in the muscles that divide his back. He is alive, but his eyes are closed and his face is sheened with sweat. He is breathing very quickly.

‘Who shot the arrow?’ Geoffrey asks.