By mid-morning Thomas and the rest of Sir John’s company are in their battle, ready to move out, two bags of arrows apiece, spare strings, mauls, bucklers, sallet helmets. Lord Fauconberg leads the way with his household men and his knights in their plate, still mounted. Their banners and standards are heavy with all the rain and hang from their battens as if broken. Fauconberg is to take the vanguard of archers and the men of Kent, while the Earls of Warwick and March are to take the other two battles.

They move up the road at the head of a loose crowd, hemmed in on both sides by dense woods of hawthorn and alder, everything vivid green with all the rain. Behind them come the rest of Fauconberg’s battle, in blocks of about two hundred men: archers, tramping along with their bows over their shoulders and their arrow bags bumping against their backs; followed by the men-at-arms with their hammers and swords; and then the Kentish billmen, with their bills and glaives. Then come more archers and so on, the pattern repeating itself down the line. Behind them come the naked men in shirtsleeves and hose wielding farm tools, and then the prickers, those old soldiers on fleet-footed horses posted to stop any stragglers turning and running.

Once or twice they are forced off the road as messengers from the front thunder past, hurrying orders from one commander to another, and all the while the drums and trumpets continue.

‘Make way! Make way there! Make way for the Archbishop!’

‘So Warwick is still trying to make terms?’ Thomas asks aloud.

‘It’s all bollocks,’ Walter says again. He is huddled in his cloak, wearing it like a winding sheet, and he is pale and worse-tempered than ever.

Thomas takes up his usual position between Dafydd and Red John, and ahead of them, across a sloping meadow framed by the trees, he can see the spires and watchtowers of Northampton behind its walls.

Above the town there is a thick column of smoke, dark against the rainclouds.

‘Is that normal?’ Thomas asks.

Walter snarls.

‘Course it’s not normal,’ he says. ‘They’re burning the town. It’s like bloody France.’

When they emerge from the trees and on to the meadow, the rain starts in earnest. They huddle in their damp jacks, and some men tuck their strings under their helmets for the sake of superstition. There is an abbey in the grounds nearby and an ornate stone monument to some long-forgotten event surrounded by camp followers and a local audience, there to watch what happens.

‘All right. All right. Move along now.’