‘Listen to what? It’s you that’s not listening, Geoffrey. Warwick says he wants to talk to the King. Fair enough, you’d say, but what does he want to talk about? I’ll tell you. He wants to talk about getting his lands back and getting rid of bastards like Buckingham and Somerset and all the other turds the King’s got hanging off him. So why would all those turds who’re hanging off him want Warwick to talk to him? They wouldn’t, and they won’t. Warwick knows that. March knows that. Which is why we’re here. A huge bloody great army that should be in France, beating the crap out of the bloody French, but instead we’re waiting to charge down there into a load of other Englishmen who are waiting to blow us into goddamned purgatory with all those bloody cannons. It’s bollocks, that’s what it is. It’s just bollocks.’

There is a long silence. Rain pits in the fire. Walter spits, then walks off and urinates loudly into a puddle.

Geoffrey raises an eyebrow and catches Thomas’s eye.

‘Ah, well,’ he says, shrugging.

Walter stops pissing halfway through. Everybody turns to wait, unsettled by the hiatus, holding their breath.

‘Saints,’ he says over his shoulder, pulling up his hose. ‘Someone’s coming.’

Geoffrey throws more wood on the fire.

‘A horseman,’ Walter whispers. ‘Maybe more than one. You lot, get out of the light. Nock your bows. Geoffrey, come with me. Henry, get the Captain of the Watch. Bring him here. Fast as you can.’

They can all hear the horse now, coming up the road from the direction of Northampton. It is coming slowly, picking its way through the dark. Thomas fingers the beak of his axe. The horse is a grey, the rider muffled in a dark travelling cloak. It stops on the fringes of light where the fire gleams faintly on his greaves and sabatons. Not a traveller then.

‘Sir, you are very welcome to our fire,’ Geoffrey calls out into the dark. ‘Though why you’re travelling on a night like this, I should dearly love to know.’

The rider kicks his horse forward one or two paces. The firelight still doesn’t stretch to his face.

‘I am here to see Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick,’ he says. He has the firm voice of the well born, though in his cloak it is impossible to make out what sort of man he is: young or old, fat or thin, well made or sickly.

Walter steps forward a pace and peers into the stranger’s face.

‘Can I tell him who you are?’ he asks.

‘He does not know me by name,’ the man says, ‘but he will want to hear what I have to say. Give him this, as a token.’

The stranger leans forward to hand something to Walter. He is wearing gloves. They still cannot see his face.