Katherine nods. Thomas stops his horse and turns in the saddle and studies the land all around, though what he is expecting to see she is not sure. The sea has reappeared on their right, a grey smear beyond the mossy flanks of the hills. Ahead is another inlet, another river, sand dunes and mudflats. It is the bay the cog master told them was haunted by the souls of drowned sailors. There is the long spit of rock he’d called the Worm’s Head, frilled with surf where the waves break.

‘But why hasn’t Riven already taken her?’ Thomas asks. ‘If he knew where she is?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Katherine says. ‘I believe he doesn’t know where she is. He only knows that we know where she is.’

Thomas thinks about this.

‘So it was him following us on the way down? Hoping we’d lead him to Margaret?’

Katherine nods.

‘It makes sense,’ she says. ‘They followed us until the storm, and then . . . well, they lost us, or I suppose we lost them.’

‘Or perhaps they are themselves lost?’

‘Let us pray to God above.’

But still she wonders if she did not see a ship berthed on the sands in the bay Dafydd had said was home. It may have been anything, or it may have been something, she does not know, but now the boy ahead has stopped on the crest of the hill and is pointing at something and they can see the sky beyond is hazed with dark smoke.

They ride up the hill past Margaret and when they get there Walter and the boy are off their horses, crouched like hunters, peering into the valley beyond. Little Dafydd is pointing at a cottage, half hidden in a copse of poplars, smoke sifting from blackened rushes where part of the roof has burned away. In the orchard there is a man lying face down, arms outstretched, and a dog is yapping somewhere.

‘God’s sake,’ is all Walter says.

They watch a while. Nothing moves.

The dog continues barking.

‘Tudor’s men?’ Thomas wonders.

Little Dafydd recognises the word Tudor and nods fiercely, but Katherine wonders. Tudor’s army landed far to the west, only that morning. Could they have come this far so soon?

The cottage is next to a ford where the drovers’ path runs through the river. The river cuts down towards the sea but vanishes into the dimpled mudflats before it gets there. She starts and squints. Settled in the sand is a wreck of a ship, small, distant, and nearby something, a dead horse perhaps, is mobbed by birds.

She nudges Thomas and points. There is something else lying in the mud down there, attracting fewer birds. It is too far to see what it is. Beams and spars and other scraps from a ship lie scattered about, half sunk in the mud.

‘Can it be the ship with green sails?’ Thomas asks.