Walter comes back down the road with five or six of the others. He has blood on the sleeves of his jack, a dent in his buckler and a small leather purse he is throwing up in the air and catching. He looks pleased with himself. Thomas is glad to see Dafydd and Owen and Red John with him. Dafydd’s hose is ripped at the knee and there is blood all over the stocking. Owen has a black eye. But they are alive.

‘Wait here, you lot,’ Walter says. ‘Take what you like off the dead, but don’t touch anything else. Don’t for fuck’s sake go in any houses or I’ll kill you myself.’

He turns and makes his way back through the town gate to the harbour. The rest of them gather around and find places to sit. They pass around a jug of ale.

‘It’s all right,’ Red John says. ‘I paid for it.’

‘Ale,’ Simon says. ‘Saints, it’s good to be back.’

But it feels wrong.

‘Feels as if we’re invading though, doesn’t it?’ Dafydd says. He gestures at the dead bodies. ‘As if we’re not wanted in our own country.’

‘You mustn’t mind all these bastards, Dafydd,’ Simon says, taking a draught. ‘They may be wearing the King’s livery, but they aren’t proper Englishmen. Bet you half of them are, you know, what-have-yous: Frenchies.’

‘Still,’ Thomas says.

‘The people want us back. You wait and see. Soon as we get on the road to Canterbury, they’ll be flocking to join us. And girls too. That’s why they don’t want us smashing the place up, nicking stuff. In case it scares them off. And to show we’re better than those bloody northern bastards. Begging your pardon, Thomas.’

Men and women and children are beginning to appear now, round-eyed, stepping between the grisly piles, stopping to stare at the bodies. Mothers hide their children’s gaze. A merchant and his wife stand in front of their house and survey its broken windows, arrow-studded thatch, and a dead body slumped across their doorstep. There are bloody fingerprints on the plaster. Then the child gets blood on her shoe and starts to cry when her mother can’t get it off.

‘I saw Thomas killed,’ Thomas says.

There are mumbles of regret and the others stare at the ground.

‘What happened to his bow?’ Dafydd asks.

Thomas’s bow had been a beauty. Thomas shakes his head. Someone must have picked it up.

‘And look what I found,’ Little John Willingham says. He shows them a finely worked dagger with a badge on its pommel. A cockerel with its tail feathers raised.

‘Wouldn’t hang on to it, if I were you,’ Dafydd cautions. ‘Imagine his son finding you with it?’

‘Well, I can’t sell it back to him, can I? Cunt’s dead.’

‘Break the chicken off then.’