Thomas tries to catch Katherine’s eye before he turns and runs, tries to reassure her that he is doing something, but she remains staring at the ground, acknowledging none. He runs through the camp to its centre. Fauconberg, March and Warwick have all been to the cathedral to hear the Te Deum and are riding north together. No one has seen Sir John.

A bell rings in the city.

Time is passing.

He begins a prayer, his footfalls punctuating the Latin lines. He abandons it halfway through. He is sick with panic. Where is he? Where is Sir John?

He thinks of Katherine. A rope around her neck. Legs kicking in mid-air. Hanging in the hawthorn branches with the laundry.

Oh Christ! He cannot stand it. He runs through the lines and back again, looking where he has already looked. Where is the old man? Surely he cannot have gone far without Geoffrey’s help?

‘Thomas!’ he hears a man cry.

Half the men in the camp are called Thomas, but Thomas recognises William Hastings’s voice. He is at the head of a table with some men Thomas does not recognise. They are drinking wine and there is a pie on a board and a small dish of salt.

‘Thomas Everingham! Hero of Newnham! Come and join us in a drink,’ Hastings calls.

‘I cannot, sir, I am looking for Sir John.’ He explains his hurry.

‘Not because of the surgeon fellow? I thought Sir John’d managed to sort that out.’

‘It’s not that. They’ve caught him trying to run.’

Hastings springs to his feet.

‘But he’s – Christ. What a waste. No. No. We can’t have that. Lead me to him. My word counts for something, enough perhaps to delay the inevitable.’

When they find her again, Katherine is standing under a tree in her shirt with her hat pushed back. She looks pitifully thin and in the watery sunlight her skin is translucent. One of Warwick’s men stands behind her, bending the damp rope to form a noose. Walter is still arguing with the vintenar. Katherine will still say nothing. It is as if she has already left them.

‘Hold fast! Hold up there!’

When he sees Hastings, the vintenar touches his knuckle to his helmet.

‘Sir,’ he says.

‘You can’t mean to hang this boy?’

‘Earl of Warwick’s orders, sir. Caught him the other side of the village over there. Put up a fight. Saved us a deal of time and trouble if we’d killed him there and then but his lordship wants an example made. So.’

Hastings turns to Katherine.

‘Is this true?’

Still Katherine says nothing. She will not even look at him.

‘Kit, you must say something in your defence. Otherwise—’

‘Get on and hang him,’ someone in the crowd jeers. The soldier throws the rope over the tree above her head.

‘Lucky he’s a little’un,’ he says, finding the branches thin.