King Henry’s wife, whom the pardoner once called a she-wolf from France, is raising an army in Scotland, just as that cookshop owner in London had foreseen, and the Duke of Somerset, her most powerful ally, is back in England, having been ejected from his castle in Guisnes. After Northampton he had promised the Earl of Warwick he would never take up arms again, and yet now he is gathering his forces just across the river in Hull. The friar, a Dominican with a powerful thirst, has heard it said the Earls of Devon and Northumberland have joined him there, along with Lords Clifford and Dacre, with enough men to march on London.

‘They’ll come down on you like locusts on the fields of Egypt,’ the friar says, drinking deep. ‘They’ll take everything they can, spoil what they cannot. I should be gone, were I you.’

His gaze rests on Goodwife Popham, and on Liz, until Geoffrey bundles him on his way. Afterwards Thomas and the rest of the men spend their days in the butts, enduring rain and hail and sleet, sometimes snow, sending flights of arrows whipping into the leaden skies.

‘We’ll never be able to stop ’em, you know,’ Little John Willingham says. ‘There’ll be too many of ’em. Our only hope is they pass us by.’

‘They won’t do that,’ Richard says. ‘We’re five miles off the road from Hull to London. Our only hope is that Warwick sends an army up north.’

‘Whatever happens it won’t be till spring, anyway,’ Geoffrey reassures them. ‘No one puts an army into the field in the winter. Hardly enough food as it is, let alone to feed ten thousand archers.’

They walk back to the hall just as the sleet starts in again.

‘Never known worse weather,’ one says. ‘It’s as if God means to flood us out.’

On the road they meet a messenger on a skinny sway-backed horse coming the other way. He has been to the hall, he tells them, with a message from Lord Fauconberg. Sir John has been ordered to take fifteen archers and ten billmen and to proceed to Sandal Castle outside Wakefield. There he will find the Duke of York and the Earl of Salisbury and he is to join with them to go north in answer to the threat posed by the army of the Queen and her magnates.

‘But it is Christmas in a week,’ Dafydd says. ‘No one fights during Christmastide, not even the bloody Scots.’

When they reach the hall Thomas drinks a mug of ale and goes up to see Katherine. Sir John is awake, sitting on the edge of the bed, his wasted legs hanging on the floor, loose skin hanging in swags from his old bones. Katherine looks exhausted, but happy – pleased with herself, even.

‘Thomas!’ Sir John cries. ‘Just in time to help an old man take his first steps in many a day.’