‘You look the part,’ Katherine says when he pulls the horse up beside her. He is wearing a travelling cloak and a velvet hat, and he seems even taller and broader on the back of a horse; had she not known him she knows she would have cowered from him. Now he swings his leg over the saddle and drops easily to the ground, just as if he had been riding the horse all his life. His wound bothers him less now, two months after it was inflicted, but his face is still drawn, and there are smudges under his blue eyes. He takes off his hat and runs a hand through his reddish hair, and smiles.

‘Would you like a turn?’ he asks, offering her the reins.

Katherine shakes her head.

‘I can hardly stay on a pony,’ she says, ‘let alone that thing.’

They both step back to admire the horse. It is a fine animal, a palfrey. It once belonged to the Earl of Shrewsbury, and had been found tethered to the rear of the tents at Northampton, its groom dead or long since fled, and after a pause while lesser lords coveted it, the Earl of March had awarded it – and Shrewsbury’s dented armour – to the man who’d killed him: Thomas Everingham, an unknown archer from the county of Lincoln, of the retinue of Sir John Fakenham.

‘What are you doing out?’ he asks.

‘Fournier is coming to bleed Sir John today,’ she says.

Thomas laughs.

‘So you’ve been sent away?’

‘No,’ Katherine begins. ‘Well. Yes. Anyway he has written to say that he is coming, and that the bleeding is in accordance with the movement of the heavenly bodies, or some such, though it is more likely he’s run out of money for wine.’

‘How’s Sir John?’ Thomas asks.

She thinks about it for a moment.

‘Low,’ she says.

Thomas grunts. They turn to watch a flock of starlings behind the plough. A wood pigeon is calling in the trees.

‘And you?’ she asks.

He raises his arm above his head to show that all is well, but says nothing.

‘I wasn’t thinking of your wound,’ she says. ‘I was thinking about – about this.’

She gestures at the soggy fields, the clutch of rough houses under the church’s tower and behind them Marton Hall, Sir John Fakenham’s manor.

‘I don’t know,’ Thomas admits. ‘I am grateful for all Sir John has done for us, and for this life, but—’ He shrugs.

It has been hard for him, Katherine knows. She has heard him grinding his teeth in the night. This anguish has delayed his recovery, she thinks, and she is sure he would be healed already if only he did not believe that God had deserted him on the field of Northampton in favour of Giles Riven.

‘But you will get your chance again,’ she says. ‘I am certain of it. God wills it.’