The road is crowded with carts banked with produce for the London markets and the word of the Duke of York’s coming passes up and down between travellers, and with each telling it is given a new twist, so that by the time they enter London through Bishopsgate just before curfew on the evening of their fourth day on the road, they don’t know whether they’ll find the city in flames, or with celebratory wine flowing in her fountains.

In the event the city seems to be in the same quandary. It is tensed for something, but no one seems to know what. They pass through all the tenter frames and the washing posts on the greens by the roadside and they find space for the cart and horses in the yard of the Bull Inn where the ostler, a fat man with a stained leather apron, tells them the Duke of York is in Abingdon, two days’ march from Westminster, and that he has trumpeters to sound fanfares wherever he goes.

When Thomas relates this to Sir John he groans.

‘To think of all the trouble taken after Northampton!’ he says. ‘How we let everyone know the King is still the King, how we bent our necks and renewed our oaths of allegiance. And now this!’

It is to get worse. After a night tormented by the inn’s sour beer and then fleas in the straw, the next day they hear from a cookshop owner who’d heard it from a boatman who’d just come from Westminster that all the talk there is of the Duke of York marching with eight hundred men under the banner of the royal arms of England, undifferenced by the strap of white that had marked his own banner from that of the King.

‘That’s it,’ the cookshop owner says. ‘When they find out he wants to be king, we’ll have those northern bastards rampaging down here again before St Martin’s, pissed as voles, nicking everything they can get their bloody hands on.’

They return to the inn.

‘Our journey has been wasted before it has reached its point,’ Sir John admits. ‘The Duke won’t spare the time to see us now, let alone hear our case.’

They order beer and drink it at the table by the fire.

‘Still,’ he goes on, ‘we’ve come this far, let us take a barge to the palace at Westminster and see what there is to be seen. If nothing else we will have something to talk about on the way home. Geoffrey, make sure the boys are cleaned up, will you? New livery coats, and as much plate as we possess, shared out, so that we look the part, eh?’