Ahead of them in the hamlet they can see a number of men in livery, some of them horsemen. They can hear the slide of harness and the stamp of horses’ hooves.

‘Here they come,’ Dafydd says. He bends and makes a sign of the cross on the mud beneath his feet. Then he takes a piece of earth in his mouth and nocks an arrow. So do all the other archers. A priest walks ahead of them, intoning the paternoster, blessing them as he goes.

They all kneel. Thomas can hardly swallow.

‘I hate this bit,’ Red John says next to him. Even in the gloom Thomas can see John’s eyes are unnaturally bright. He wishes he had a wineskin with him, or a mug of ale. It is easier with drink.

‘Wait for the order,’ Walter murmurs. He licks his finger and checks the wind. There is none.

A party of well-mounted horsemen ride forward from their lines up the road and into the hamlet.

‘Who are they?’ Thomas asks.

‘Heralds,’ an archer at the front says. ‘Warwick Herald, there.’

They relax. Red John stabs his arrow back in the ground. The horsemen, about five of them in different coloured tabards, dismount and leave their horses for a servant.

‘Parley, it is,’ Walter says. ‘See if we’re going to fight.’

Thomas finds his lips moving in prayer. Minutes pass. The light grows stronger. Someone is sick. Men laugh. Thomas holds out his hand and watches it tremble. It will be better when it starts. He wishes he’d had something to eat and he still craves something to drink – anything.

Then, suddenly, instantly, he is no longer afraid: he is bored.

He thinks about Katherine. She has been behaving strangely since they returned to England. Perhaps it is being so close to Canterbury. He looks across at the spire of the cathedral and thinks about returning to orders again. He looks at his hands: how they have changed their shape. They are calloused and square now, firm with muscle, and all that remains to mark his former life is a dent in his forefinger where he held the reed. His arms must have doubled their girth.

Now he tries to imagine the Prior of All, just beyond the city walls, seated over some wine in a room very like the almonry. He can see him receiving Katherine back into the order, and then what? Here the picture becomes vague. He cannot imagine her standing before the Prior in her stained jack, her hacked-off hair, with her hose sagging around her ankles. He cannot imagine her bowing her head to some old man.