The next morning, Fournier had been up before first light. He’d collected his horse and his tools and had ridden south, pausing only by the gate to look back at her, and she had thought he was about to say something when Walter chased him away.

‘Good riddance,’ Walter had said.

But what had he been about to say, and where was he going? As he’d hauled himself up into his saddle and turned his horse south, he’d sent her a particular knowing look.

The only sound around them now is the dipping of the boy’s paddle and the gurgle of the waters.

‘Still thinks someone’s there, Owen does,’ Dafydd calls. ‘A boat.’

‘What?’ Walter bellows. ‘For the love of Christ!’

They gather in the stern and stare back along the river. Nothing.

‘Kit?’

She can’t see anything, but she trusts Owen and as one they find their boat poles to send the boat surging forward, a shunt that makes the horses stagger.

In a little while the horizon becomes dominated by the looming bulk of a bluff-walled castle, flags at every buttress, chimneys leaking coal smoke.

‘Warwick Castle,’ the boatman’s boy tells them. They stop punting to stare up at the castle as they come under its walls, from the top of which men in helmets look down on them.

Thomas stares open-mouthed and even Walter seems impressed. But Owen is still studying the riverbanks in their wake.

‘Seen anything?’ Katherine asks.

He shakes his head. At Stratford the boatman will go no farther, so they pay him off and the next morning they find a larger barge, crewed by three men who will only leave their places by the fire in the hall of a riverside inn for such wages as make Walter hate them and admire them in equal parts.

‘What’s your hurry?’ one of them asks.

‘Just get on with it,’ Walter tells him. They load the horses and push themselves off through the river traffic. From here the water becomes busier, with all manner of boats coming and going, sails set, men on the oars, rowing barrels and sacks and more horses up and down the river. Again Owen sits in the back with his bow across his knees. He’d have been easy to ignore if Dafydd hadn’t kept glancing across at him.

‘What’s he got? Some kind of magic sense or something?’ Walter asks.

‘Never been wrong yet,’ Dafydd tells them.

‘But there are loads of boats following us!’ Walter cries. ‘Look. That one, with the patched sail. Cows on board. They can’t be following us, can they? Cows. Ever think of that?’