Thomas’s eyes ache as he inches his gaze across the clearing. A gap in the ranks has appeared and there is the Earl of March, huge in his steel plate, on one knee before the King, the whey-faced, boneless man whom Thomas saw the moment before he passed out. The King looks stricken, mortified. He doesn’t seem to know what to do, what to say to this bloodied giant kneeling before him. Thomas can almost smile. He wishes Katherine were there. It would make her laugh and mutter something. Behind the two but standing apart from a mob of other men in harness is the Earl of Warwick.

It does not look as if he has exerted himself in the battle. He is still smiling as he looks up and around the gathering, and then his smile broadens in welcome. He raises his gloved hand and a man on a grey horse slides across Thomas’s vision, blocking it for a moment, so that all he can see are the man’s cuisses, his greaves and his sabatons. And then the man gets down from the horse and the horse is led away and Thomas sees the man in full for the first time and he recognises him as being the visitor from the night before, who came to see the Earl of Warwick.

It is Ruthyn’s man, he who organised the arrangement, and Warwick is turning to him with that smile, crossing the clearing to greet him, and while every other man is now cheering at what is happening, and while Warwick’s and March’s and Fauconberg’s men are celebrating their famous victory at this field outside the town of Northampton, Thomas is gripped by a new spasm, and is spewing such ale as he has drunk in a hot stinging torrent for now he recognises the man.

Riven.

It is Giles Riven, his hands still clasped in the Earl of Warwick’s, and there in the background, holding that grey mare, is the giant, and his naked feet are the last thing Thomas sees as the pain swells in his limbs, and once again he passes into a void of echoing whiteness.

PART FOUR

Marton Hall, County of
Lincoln, September 1460

20

IT IS LATE summer and the air is pungent with ripe fruit and turned earth. Slender stooks of oats are piled by the barn and an old man and his boy are guiding two oxen and a plough across their furlong of rain-blackened soil. Katherine, for want of anything else to do, is helping an old woman comb the brambles for blackberries and she has almost filled her basket when they hear the steady clop of hooves. A horseman coming from the village – a visitor with news of the outside world perhaps. When they see it is only Thomas, the old woman goes back to work.