‘He’s a boy,’ Thomas is saying. ‘He should still be at home. Not seeing all this.’ He gestures at the marketplace where now the rain has washed the blood from the cobbles, and all that remains of the fight are broken windows, starred stonework, arrows stuck in thatched roofs like pins in a cushion. One wall is still sooty and pocked where the gun exploded.

Geoffrey laughs.

‘Listen to you, Thomas. Ha. Like the old soldier all of a sudden.’

Thomas thinks for a moment. Christ. Geoffrey is right. All the things he’s done. The men he’s killed.

Look at his hands! Blood in the creases. Dear God.

‘And plenty been to fight younger’n Hugh,’ Geoffrey is saying. ‘I was in France when I was his age. And Walter? Well, how old was he when he first went to the wars? Three? Four?’ The ale leaves a wet crescent on Geoffrey’s upper lip.

‘But Hugh feels things,’ Thomas goes on. ‘Did you see him after we’d landed? He’d vomited on himself and soiled his hose. He’d not loosed an arrow.’

Geoffrey looks away, as if it is somehow his fault.

‘I’ll make sure he has more ale next time.’

‘It is not want of pluck, I think.’

Geoffrey shrugs.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he says. ‘Perhaps he shouldn’t be here. Perhaps he should be in a monastery.’

Thomas opens and shuts his mouth. A boy comes through the harbour gate where the portcullis has been broken down and already taken away by a smith.

‘The Earl of Warwick is come!’ he shouts, and they begin drinking up. By the time Warwick has disembarked, word has got out. Men and women and children are ignoring the rain and have come to watch.

Warwick rides the same beautiful black horse he rode hunting that day, and he is wearing a travelling cloak with a cross of St George on a tabard underneath. It is a gesture to please the common soldier and to let the people know he has not come to make war on their king. As he passes, the crowd shout their greetings and thank him for coming. Men bless him.

‘A Warwick!’ they cry. ‘A Warwick!’

‘Why do they love him so?’ Thomas asks. He remembers seeing Warwick after the hunt. Hastings would not be drawn on what had happened in the forest, but it was the Earl who shot Richard, and the Earl who rode away in haste.

‘You can’t blame them, Thomas,’ Geoffrey is telling him. ‘He’s kept the Narrow Sea free of pirates these past years, free of Frenchmen. More than the King could ever do.’