They step on to the mossy bridge and wait while another iron-hooped gate is opened by unseen hands. Beyond is a dark tunnel, barred by an iron portcullis, which rises to admit them with another rattle of chains. Through that a further gate stands open, its daylight portioned by the bars of yet another portcullis. While this is inching its way up into the ceiling Thomas looks up to see faces peering down at them from the murder holes above.

‘Pretty tidy,’ Walter admits. ‘Take a hundred bombards to knock a hole in this.’

A man appears beyond the gate.

‘We’ve no news Tudor has bombards,’ he says in an up-and-down accent. ‘Only an army of Irishmen. They’re devils for rapine, they are, and best killed on sight, like wolves, and as for the Frenchies, well, I expect them to be more busy than bold, as usual.’

He names himself as Gruffydd Dwnn, the constable of the castle, of the affinity of Richard, Duke of York. He is wearing an old-fashioned hood, such as Thomas remembers the pardoner wearing, though this man is an old soldier, flint-hard, his nose a mess, as if he’s been hit by a hammer.

He leads them out from under the gatehouse and into the castle’s outer ward. Here is a clutch of rough tents and lean-tos and the air between the walls is hazy with the smoke of cooking fires. To one side the entire village’s livestock compete for space behind a woven withy fence and the smell is powerful.

‘So that’s where everybody is,’ Walter says.

As news of their arrival spreads, a hundred faces, smoke-smutted and filthy, some of them flame-red-haired, emerge to stare at them through the murk of the smoke. A brindled dog on a rope barks at them.

‘Crowded,’ the old man agrees with Walter’s unspoken observation, ‘but these walls make us too tough a nut for all but the largest army to crack. Tudor’s men will pass us by in the hope of easier meat in England.’

A woman in a russet sackcloth dress and filthy coif shouts something, and comes pushing her way through the camp, clearing a path to Dafydd and Owen, still yelling and gesticulating with powerful, heavily freckled arms. She greets Dafydd with a soft cuff and then is folded into a hug by both men.

‘Is that Gwen?’ Walter asks out of the corner of his mouth. ‘She looks like a murderess.’

Katherine asks Dwnn if they might find a vantage point from where they can see the sea.

‘Fine view of the sea from up there,’ Dwnn tells her, with a sideways glance. He points her to a low doorway in the side of the gatehouse. Thomas follows her up the spiral steps past a doorway into a tapestried hall and on up.

‘You don’t think it can have followed us here?’ Thomas asks. ‘It’d be witchcraft, after that storm.’