‘No,’ he says. ‘There will be no more battles in England. The country is at peace now, or so Richard says. When the Duke of York comes from Ireland, he will take up his rightful position on the council, and that will be that.’

‘No? What of the Queen? What of her? And what of the sons of all those men killed at Northampton? What of all those who took to their heels that day? Surely they will not let this rest?’

‘No one even knows where the Queen is. And she’s a woman. She has no power. No say.’

She stares at him. Is he joking? Apparently not.

‘But she has a son, doesn’t she?’ she perseveres. ‘She must hope to see him on the throne one day?’

‘And she will,’ Thomas goes on as if it is she who is the fool. ‘When our present king Henry dies. Besides. You miss the point. Riven is on our side now. If Sir John goes to war again, so will he, and I shall be standing shoulder to shoulder with him.’

‘As if that matters,’ she counters. ‘You heard Richard’s story of the knight called William Lucy? Who hurried to the field outside Northampton too late to aid the King, only be struck down by one of the King’s men who had an interest in his wife?’

Thomas thinks back to the battle and wonders how many such incidents there were that day. He can recall pieces of it, distant fractured moments, fleetingly glimpsed. After the fighting was done they had helped dispose of the bodies, throwing some in the river to join those already drowned, dragging others to a pit dug by a farmer and his boys and burying them there. They returned those of the nobles – their weight lightened by thieving hands – to their heralds. A Mass was heard in the nearby abbey, for some show of sorrow was necessary when among the defeated dead were the victors’ cousins, uncles, brothers-in-law and nephews.

‘This is how it goes,’ Sir John had said. ‘War: cruel and sharp.’

They’d found Red John lying on his back. Rainwater was cupped in his eye sockets, his helmet tipped from his head and his russet hair washed back in waves. His alabaster skin was cold to the touch, his freckles somehow pale, and when they turned him over they found he was lying on one of the barbed traps used to cripple horses. They’d had to pull hard to remove it from his spine and in the end they couldn’t, so they buried him with the caltrop in place in a good deep hole of his own, quite near the abbey where King Henry and the Earls of Warwick and March were saying their prayers. It was not consecrated ground, but it would have to do. Thomas had watched from the back of a cart with tears in his eyes.