It is daylight when she opens her eyes the next time, woken by hunger. Thomas is sitting at a bench, making marks in the pardoner’s ledger. He looks careworn and sorrowful. She thinks of him when she first saw him, running in the snow beyond the priory’s walls, and then his face with the sun falling on it when they were in Calais, and now this. She finds tears in her eyes. He is such a good soul, she thinks, and has suffered so for the sake of others. Now he turns and is looking at her, with a smile breaking through the worry. It is like the onset of spring, or the sun breaking through clouds.

‘Katherine?’ he says, his voice cracking. ‘You are with us. Praise the Lord!’

He swings his feet and comes to her. She says nothing. Her mouth is foul and her head aches almost as badly as her stomach. He helps her to sit up and she drinks the ale from a slimy leather cup.

‘How long have I been like this?’ she croaks.

‘Days,’ he says. ‘A week even.’ He too has lost track of time.

A moment later the innkeeper comes in with wood for the fire.

‘God’s grace!’ he exclaims. ‘She lives.’

The lumpen servant girl appears over his shoulder and looks disappointed. When they have gone Katherine turns to Thomas again.

‘Did I dream the news that Richard of York is dead?’

Thomas shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘And further confirmation has come.’

He tells her how he has heard that Richard of York and his army had emerged from Sandal Castle only to be engulfed by a much larger force led by the Queen’s favourite, the Duke of Somerset, and Andrew Trollope, the man who had led the Calais force that switched sides the year before. He describes how the innkeeper laughed as he told him the battle lasted mere minutes and that the Duke of York had his head knocked from his shoulders and set on a pike and carried to York where it is set on the gatehouse.

‘“So York can overlook York!” he said.’

They’d even put a paper crown on his head as well, so he looked the part, the innkeeper said. The Earl of Salisbury had been executed the following day and the Duke of York’s younger son, the Earl of Rutland, whom they’d seen arguing with the Earl of Warwick in Westminster that summer, was murdered after the battle, and now all three heads were on pikes together. Heralds have named the battle after the nearby town of Wakefield.

Katherine asks about Sir John Fakenham and the others, about Richard and Geoffrey, and all the other Johns who had been waiting to join the Duke of York.