When they’d finished they set off back towards London with King Henry treated as he should be, riding at the front of the column, attended by Warwick and March, the Archbishop, the Legate, and even Henry, the archer from Kent, who smiled all the way home.

It was then, on the road south, camped by a crooked cross where two old roads met, that Warwick had decided in Riven’s favour. He had given him the right to Cornford Castle and all its lands, and the wardship of Lord Cornford’s daughter until she came of age. Sir John had argued that the girl was engaged to Richard, his own son, whom Warwick had nearly killed in a hunting accident, and that Cornford was his cousin, and that he was due the castle and its estates. But Warwick was blithe. In return for the castle, Riven was to give up Marton Hall, the house he had forcefully occupied the year before, and gift Sir John a sum of money in recompense.

‘It is because of Riven’s part in Ruthyn’s defection,’ Geoffrey said, ‘and the fact he has a hundred mounted archers to call his own.’

It had been a depressing lesson in the power of power.

The journey from there to Marton had taken four days and in all that time Sir John said not one word. He’d sat on the cushion on his trunk in the cart and stared at his feet, a hiss of drawn breath whenever they hit a pothole. Not even the sight of Richard recovering from his wound and able to ride a horse again cheered him that much, and when they stopped in front of Marton Hall all he could do was look at it with tears in his eyes. It was not the sort of homecoming any of them had imagined.

In his absence the hall had been sorely treated. The windows were gone. A wall was broken down so that the joists of the upper floor splayed in mid-air like spread fingers and the roof sagged. Broken tiles lay scattered about the yard and a sheep’s carcass poisoned the well. The lead on the outhouse roof had been taken, and there was a pile of shit below the privy that must have been there six months or more.

‘Bastard,’ was all Sir John had muttered when he saw the bed upstairs had also been stolen. ‘Bastard.’

In the weeks that followed Richard set about restoring the old house to a fit state, and now, two months later, a fire burns in the hall and Sir John can lie upstairs in a new-made bed, protected from the draughts by woollen blankets and the yards of blue damask that hang all around.