‘I’ll take you to Stratford,’ he says, putting the cleaver aside, but not so far aside that he cannot reach it. He has an accent like Geoffrey. ‘You can get a barge from there, downriver to Bristol. Or Gloucester. Last bridge on the Severn. Or first, depending on how you look it at.’

‘Can we stay the night?’ Katherine asks. ‘Or is there an inn nearby?’

The man looks them over. What choice does he have? He gives them what little ale he has and they share some pottage with him and his boy and then they sit crammed together on the ground by the fire in his cottage, watching the smoke rise from damp logs until there’s nothing left to burn. Behind them the boatman’s goat and dog stare at them, the dismal flame hardly reflected in their eyes.

‘You think someone’s really following us?’ Thomas asks in the darkness.

Walter shrugs.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Course not. Why would they?’

But although no one knows the answer to this, they do not believe him and they sleep only fitfully that night, and in the morning there is a sour gruel flavoured by a badger’s bone. The boats’ ochre sails are gathered in sagging rolls on their booms and there is an ankle-deep soup of leaves and river water in the bottom of each.

‘Not getting in there,’ Dafydd says. ‘Sink soon as you look at it, that one.’

But they force the horses up the gangplank and in with a barrage of hooves on the hull’s thin boards. Ice slicks everything and the boatman gives them each a long pole with which to push against the bank or the riverbed and then he sets the sail just as the boy unhitches the aft rope and loops it in.

Katherine catches Thomas’s eye, knowing what he is thinking.

‘I half expect to see the giant appear,’ she says.

‘This time we’re ready.’ Thomas smiles, and he nods to where Owen sits with his bowstring nocked and a bag of arrows at his waist. The current takes them westwards. After a while Katherine sits in the bows of the boat and her thoughts turn to that evening with Fournier again.

Once Thomas had calmed her down and taken the knife from her, she had left the hall and gone to sit in the yard with Liz Popham, who was having trouble trying to decide whom she should take as a husband: Little John Willingham or John Brampton. Katherine had said nothing. She did not – still doesn’t – suppose it mattered which one Liz chose, since both were so similar, but afterwards she spent an anxious night unable to sleep for fear of what Fournier might do next.